English

Evidence for +-s-wave pairing symmetry in LiFeAs: specific heat study

Superconductivity 2012-03-08 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We report specific heat capacity measurements on a LiFeAs single crystal at temperatures down to 400 mK and magnetic fields up to 9 Tesla. A small specific heat jump at Tc and finite residual density of states at T=0 K in the superconducting (SC) state indicate that there are strong unitary scatterers that lead to states within the SC gap. A sub-linear magnetic field dependence of the Sommerfeld coefficient \gamma(H) at T=0 K is equally well fitted by both a nodal d-wave gap as well as a sign changing multiband \pm s-wave gap. When impurity effects are taken into account, however, the linear temperature dependence of the electronic specific heat C_{el}/T at low temperatures argues against a nodal d-wave superconducting gap. We conclude that the SC state of LiFeAs is most compatible with the multiband \pm s-wave SC state with the gap values \Delta_{small}=0.46 \Delta_{large}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.1362,
  title  = {Evidence for +-s-wave pairing symmetry in LiFeAs: specific heat study},
  author = {Dong-Jin Jang and J. B. Hong and Y. S. Kwon and T. Park and K. Gofryk and F. Ronning and J. D. Thompson and Yunkyu Bang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.1362},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures