No Arabic abstract
We propose nanoscale magnetometry via isolated single-spin qubits as a probe of superconductivity in two-dimensional materials. We characterize the magnetic field noise at the qubit location, arising from current and spin fluctuations in the sample and leading to measurable polarization decay of the qubit. We show that the noise due to transverse current fluctuations studied as a function of temperature and sample-probe distance can be used to extract useful information about the transition to a superconducting phase and the pairing symmetry of the superconductor. Surprisingly, at low temperatures, the dominant contribution to the magnetic noise arises from longitudinal current fluctuations and can be used to probe collective modes such as monolayer plasmons and bilayer Josephson plasmons. We also characterize the noise due to spin fluctuations, which allows probing the spin structure of the pairing wave function. Our results provide a non-invasive route to probe the rich physics of two-dimensional superconductors.
A single-spin qubit placed near the surface of a conductor acquires an additional contribution to its $1/T_1$ relaxation rate due to magnetic noise created by electric current fluctuations in the material. We analyze this technique as a wireless probe of superconductivity in atomically thin two dimensional materials. At temperatures $T lesssim T_c$, the dominant contribution to the qubit relaxation rate is due to transverse electric current fluctuations arising from quasiparticle excitations. We demonstrate that this method enables detection of metal-to-superconductor transitions, as well as investigation of the symmetry of the superconducting gap function, through the noise scaling with temperature. We show that scaling of the noise with sample-probe distance provides a window into the non-local quasi-static conductivity of superconductors, both clean and disordered. At low temperatures the quasiparticle fluctuations get suppressed, yet the noise can be substantial due to resonant contributions from collective longitudinal modes, such as plasmons in monolayers and Josephson plasmons in bilayers. Potential experimental implications are discussed.
The study of exotic one-dimensional states, particularly those at the edges of topological materials, demand new experimental probes that can access the interplay between charge and spin degrees of freedom. One potential approach is to use a single spin probe, such as a Nitrogen Vacancy center in diamond, which has recently emerged as a versatile tool to probe nanoscale systems in a non-invasive fashion. Here we present a theory describing how noise magnetometry with spin probes can directly address several questions that have emerged in experimental studies of 1D systems, including those in topological materials. We show that by controlling the spin degree of freedom of the probe, it is possible to measure locally and independently local charge and spin correlations of 1D systems. Visualization of 1D edge states, as well as sampling correlations with wavevector resolution can be achieved by tuning the probe-to-sample distance. Furthermore, temperature-dependent measurements of magnetic noise can clearly delineate the dominant scattering mechanism (impurities vs. interactions) -- this is of particular relevance to quantum spin Hall measurements where conductance quantization is not perfect. The possibility to probe both charge and spin excitations in a wide range of length scales opens new pathways to bridging the large gap between atomic scale resolution of scanning probes and global transport measurements.
Fully gapped two-dimensional superconductors coupled to dynamical electromagnetism are known to exhibit topological order. In this work, we develop a unified low-energy description for spin-singlet paired states by deriving topological Chern-Simons field theories for $s$-wave, $d+id$, and chiral higher even-wave superconductors. These theories capture the quantum statistics and fusion rules of Bogoliubov quasiparticles and vortices and incorporate global continuous symmetries - specifically, spin rotation and conservation of magnetic flux - present in all singlet superconductors. For all such systems, we compute the Hall response for these symmetries and investigate the physics at the edge. In particular, the weakly-coupled phase of a chiral $d+id$ chiral state has a spin Hall coefficient $ u_s=2$ and a vanishing Hall response for the magnetic flux symmetry. We argue that the latter is a generic result for two-dimensional superconductors with gapped photons, thereby demonstrating the absence of a spontaneous magnetic field in the ground state of chiral superconductors. It is also shown that the Chern-Simons theories of chiral spin-singlet superconductors derived here fall into Kitaevs 16-fold classification of topological superconductors.
Recent discovery of Ising superconductivity protected against in-plane magnetic field by spin-orbit coupling (SOC) has stimulated intensive research interests. The effect, however, was only expected to appear in two-dimensional (2D) noncentrosymmetric materials with spin-valley locking. In this work, we proposed a new type of Ising superconductivity in 2D materials with $C_{nz}$ rotational symmetry ($n=3,4,6$). This mechanism, dubbed as type-II Ising superconductivity, is applicable for centrosymmetric materials. Type-II Ising superconductivity relies on the SOC-induced spin-orbital locking characterized by Ising-type Zeeman-like fields displaying opposite signs for opposing orbitals. We found that type-II Ising superconductivity are most prominent around time-reversal invariant momenta and is not sensitive to inversion symmetry breaking. By performing high-throughput first-principles calculations, about one hundred candidate materials were identified. Our work significantly enriches the physics and materials of Ising superconductor, opening new opportunities for fundamental research and practical applications of 2D materials.
We study the properties of $s$-wave superconductivity induced around a nematic quantum critical point in two-dimensional metals. The strong Landau damping and the Cooper pairing between incoherent fermions have dramatic mutual influence on each other, and hence should be treated on an equal footing. This problem is addressed by analyzing the self-consistent Dyson-Schwinger equations for the superconducting gap and Landau damping rate. We solve the equations at zero temperature without making any linearization, and show that the superconducting gap is maximized at the quantum critical point and decreases rapidly as the system departs from this point. The interplay between nematic fluctuation and an additional pairing interaction, caused by phonon or other boson mode, is also investigated. The total superconducting gap generated by such interplay can be several times larger than the direct sum of the gaps separately induced by these two pairing interactions. This provides a promising way to achieve remarkable enhancement of superconductivity.