No Arabic abstract
We show that low-lying excitations of a 2D BCS superconductor are significantly altered when coupled to an externally driven cavity, which induces controllable long-range attractive interactions between the electrons. We find that they combine non-linearly with intrinsic local interactions to increase the Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitation energies, thus enlarging the superconducting gap. The long-range nature of the driven-cavity-induced attraction qualitatively changes the collective excitations of the superconductor. Specifically, they lead to the appearance of additional collective excitations of the excitonic modes. Furthermore, the Higgs mode is pushed into the gap and now lies below the Bogoliubov quasiparticle continuum such that it cannot decay into quasiparticles. This way, the Higgs modes lifetime is greatly enhanced.
The Higgs mode associated with amplitude fluctuations of the superconducting gap in uniform superconductors usually is heavy, which makes its excitation and detection difficult. We report on the existence of a gapless Higgs mode in the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov states. This feature is originated from the Goldstone mode associated with the translation symmetry breaking. The existence of the gapless Higgs mode is demonstrated by using both a phenomenological model and microscopic Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. The gapless Higgs mode can avoid the decay into other low energy excitations, which renders it stable and detectable.
We predict that long-range triplet correlations (LRTC) can be generated and manipulated by supercurrent in superconductor/ferromagnet (S/F) hybrids with extrinsic impurity spin-orbit coupling (SOC). The structure of the supercurrent-induced LRTC is studied both for S/F bilayers and S/F/S Josephson junctions. We demonstrate that in S/F/S junctions, where the Josephson coupling is realized via the supercurrent-induced LRTC, the ground state phase can be switched between $0$ and $pi$. The switching is controlled by relative directions of the condensate momentum in superconducting leads, thus realizing a new physical principle of the $0-pi$ shifter.
We report an experimental study of proximity effect-induced superconductivity in crystalline Cu and Co nanowires and a nanogranular Co nanowire structure in contact with a superconducting W floating electrode which we call inducer. The nanowires were grown by electrochemical deposition in heavy-ion-track etched polycarbonate templates. The nanogranular Co structure was fabricated by focused electron beam induced deposition (FEBID), while the amorphous W inducer was obtained by focused ion beam induced deposition (FIBID). For electrical resistance measurements up to three pairs of Pt voltage leads were deposited by FIBID at different distances beside the inner inducer electrode, thus allowing us to probe the proximity effect over a length of 2-12 $mu$m. Relative $R(T)$ drops of the same order of magnitude have been observed for the Co and Cu nanowires when sweeping the temperature below 5.2 K ($T_c$ of the FIBID-deposited W inducer). By contrast, relative $R(T)$ drops were found to be an order of magnitude smaller for the nanogranular Co nanowire structure. Our analysis of the resistance data shows that the superconducting proximity length in crystalline Cu and Co is about 1 $mu$m at low temperatures, attesting to a long-range proximity effect in the case of ferromagnetic Co. Moreover, this long-range proximity effect has been revealed to be insusceptible to magnetic fields up to 11 T, which is indicative of spin-triplet pairing. At the same time, in the nanogranular Co structure proximity-induced superconductivity is strongly suppressed due to the dominating Cooper pair scattering caused by the intrinsic microstructure of the FEBID deposit.
Photo-excitation is a very powerful way to instantaneously drive a material into a novel quantum state without any fabrication, and variable ultrafast techniques have been developed to observe how electron-, lattice-, and spin-degrees of freedom change. One of the most spectacular phenomena is photo-induced superconductivity, and it has been suggested in cuprates that the transition temperature Tc can be enhanced from original Tc with significant lattice modulations. Here we show another photo-induced high-Tc superconducting state in the iron-based superconductor FeSe with semi-metallic hole and electron bands. The transient electronic state in the entire Brillouin zone is directly observed by the time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy using extreme ultraviolet pulses obtained from high harmonic generation. Our results of dynamical behaviors on timescales from 50 fs to 800 ps consistently support the favorable superconducting state after photo-excitation well above Tc. This finding demonstrates that multiband iron-based superconductors emerge as an alternative candidate for photo-induced superconductors.
We present a new model of sequential adsorption in which the adsorbing particles experience dipolar interactions. We show that in the presence of these long-range interactions, highly ordered structures in the adsorbed layer may be induced at low temperatures. The new phenomenology manifests through significant variations of the pair correlation function and the jamming limit, with respect to the case of noninteracting particles. Our study could be relevant in understanding the adsorption of magnetic colloidal particles in presence of a magnetic field.