No Arabic abstract
We show that Cooper pairing can occur intrinsically away from the Fermi surface in $j=3/2$ superconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling and equally curved bands in the normal state. In contrast to conventional pairing between spin-$1/2$ electrons, we derive that pairing can happen between inter-band electrons having different total angular momenta, i.e., $j=1/2$ with $j=3/2$ electrons. Such superconducting correlations manifest themselves by a pair of indirect gap-like structures at finite excitation energies. An observable signature of this exotic pairing is the emergence of a pair of symmetric superconducting coherence peaks in the density of states at finite energies. We argue that finite-energy pairing is a generic feature of high-spin superconductors, both in presence and absence of inversion symmetry.
Recent experiments have revealed the evidence of nodal-line superconductivity in half-Heusler superconductors, e.g. YPtBi. Theories have suggested the topological nature of such nodal-line superconductivity and proposed the existence of surface Majorana flat bands on the (111) surface of half-Heusler superconductors. Due to the divergent density of states of the surface Majorana flat bands, the surface order parameter and the surface impurity play essential roles in determining the surface properties. In this work, we studied the effect of the surface order parameter and the surface impurity on the surface Majorana flat bands of half-Heusler superconductors based on the Luttinger model. To be specific, we consider the topological nodal-line superconducting phase induced by the singlet-quintet pairing mixing, classify all the possible translationally invariant order parameters for the surface states according to irreducible representations of $C_{3v}$ point group, and demonstrate that any energetically favorable order parameter needs to break time-reversal symmetry. We further discuss the energy splitting in the energy spectrum of surface Majorana flat bands induced by different order parameters and non-magnetic or magnetic impurities. We proposed that the splitting in the energy spectrum can serve as the fingerprint of the pairing symmetry and mean-field order parameters. Our theoretical prediction can be examined in the future scanning tunneling microscopy experiments.
High temperature superconducting materials have been known since the pioneering work of Bednorz and Mueller in 1986. While the microscopic mechanism responsible for high Tc superconductivity is still debated, most materials showing high Tc contain highly electronic polarizable ions, suggesting that the mechanism driving high Tc superconductivity can be related to the ion electronic polarizability in high Tc materials. Here we show that a free charge carrier polarizes the ions surrounding it and the total electrical potential generated by the charge carrier itself and the polarized ions becomes attractive in some regions of space. Our results on bulk FeSe, monolayer FeSe on SrTiO3 and La2CuO4 are in excellent agreement with the experiments. The fact that the electronic polarizability explains correctly and quantitatively the superconductivity parameters: Tc, gap and paring energies of both pnictides and cuprates with similar polarizability parameters, suggests that the same model may be applicable to other material systems within these groups as well as other high Tc groups.
We study the time evolution of a system of fermions with pairing interactions at a finite temperature. The dynamics is triggered by an abrupt increase of the BCS coupling constant. We show that if initially the fermions are in a normal phase, the amplitude of the BCS order parameter averaged over the Boltzman distribution of initial states exhibits damped oscillations with a relatively short decay time. The latter is determined by the temperature, the single-particle level spacing, and the ground state value of the BCS gap for the new coupling. In contrast, the decay is essentially absent when the system was in a superfluid phase before the coupling increase.
Superconductivity arises from two distinct quantum phenomena: electron pairing and long-range phase coherence. In conventional superconductors, the two quantum phenomena generally take place simultaneously, while the electron pairing occurs at higher temperature than the long-range phase coherence in the underdoped high-Tc cuprate superconductors. Recently, whether electron pairing is also prior to long-range phase coherence in single-layer FeSe film on SrTiO3 substrate is under debate. Here, by measuring Knight shift and nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate, we unambiguously reveal a pseudogap behavior below Tp ~ 60 K in two layered FeSe-based superconductors with quasi-two-dimension. In the pseudogap regime, a weak diamagnetic signal and a remarkable Nernst effect are also observed, which indicate that the observed pseudogap behavior is related to superconducting fluctuations. These works confirm that strong phase fluctuation is an important character in the two-dimensional iron-based superconductors as widely observed in high-Tc cuprate superconductors.
In many unconventional superconductors, the presence of a pseudogap - a suppression in the electronic density of states extending above the critical temperature - has been a long-standing mystery. Here, we employ combined textit{in situ} electrical transport and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements to reveal an unprecedentedly large pseudogap regime in single-layer FeSe/SrTiO$_3$, an interfacial superconductor where incoherent Cooper pairs are initially formed above $T_{Delta}$ $approx$ 60 K, but where a zero resistance state is only achieved below $T_{0}$ $<$ 30 K. We show that this behavior is accompanied by distinct transport signatures of two-dimensional phase fluctuating superconductivity, suggesting a mixed vortex state hosting incoherent Cooper pairs which persist well above the maximum clean limit $T_{c}$ of $approx$ 40 K. Our work establishes the critical role of reduced dimensionality in driving the complex interplay between Cooper pairing and phase coherence in two-dimensional high-$T_c$ superconductors, providing a paradigm for understanding and engineering higher-$T_{c}$ interfacial superconductors.