Deciphering Chiral Superconductivity via Impurity Bound States
Abstract
Determining the symmetry of Cooper pairs remains a central challenge in the study of unconventional superconductors, particularly for chiral states that spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry. Here we demonstrate that point-like impurities in chiral superconductors generate in-gap bound states with a distinctive asymmetry: the local density of states at the impurity site vanishes at one bound-state energy, but not at its particle-hole conjugate. We prove this behavior analytically in generic two-dimensional, single-band chiral superconductors, showing it arises from a fundamental interplay between pairing chirality and crystalline rotation symmetry. Our numerical simulations confirm that this diagnostic feature persists in multiband systems and for spatially extended impurities. Our results establish a symmetry-enforced real-space diagnostic for chiral superconductivity at the atomic scale.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.20842,
title = {Deciphering Chiral Superconductivity via Impurity Bound States},
author = {Yuchang Cai and Rui-Xing Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.20842},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
6 + 7 pages, 4 + 3 figures