English

Chiral Superconductivity in UTe$_2$ via Emergent $C_4$ Symmetry and Spin Orbit Coupling

Superconductivity 2022-12-12 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

A lot of attention has been drawn to superconductivity in UTe2_2, with suggestions of time-reversal symmetry breaking triplet chiral superconducting order parameter. The chirality of the order parameter has been attributed to an accidental near degeneracy of two superconducting components belonging to 1D irreps B2uB_{2u} and B3uB_{3u} of the relevant D2hD_{2h} point group, and it has been argued that the chiral B2u+iB3uB_{2u}+iB_{3u} combination is selected by ferromagnetic fluctuations. In this work we present a possible explanation of the near-degeneracy as a result of an accidental C4C_4 symmetry of the band structure, with the superconducting order parameter belonging the 2D EuE_u irrep of D4hD_{4h} that uniquely descends to the sought after B2u+iB3uB_{2u}+iB_{3u} combination. We show that the C4C_4 symmetry is emergent at the level of the interactions using a renormalization group calculation and argue that the chiral combination of the order parameter is favored when spin-orbit coupling is added to the model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.11732,
  title  = {Chiral Superconductivity in UTe$_2$ via Emergent $C_4$ Symmetry and Spin Orbit Coupling},
  author = {Daniel Shaffer and Dmitry Chichinadze},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.11732},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

12 pages, 10 figures