English

Magnetic-field-tunable commensurate multi-q charge orders on UTe2 (011) surface

Superconductivity 2026-03-31 v1

Abstract

The heavy-fermion superconductor UTe2 has attracted intense interest as a candidate for spin-triplet pairing. Recent scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) studies have reported complex charge orders (COs) on its (011) surface, but their origin and relationship with superconductivity remain controversial. Here, by performing temperature-, magnetic field-, and sample-dependent STM measurements, we identify multiple new CO wave vectors beyond those previously reported. All these CO wave vectors are strictly locked to integer multiples of 1/14 and 1/4 of the reciprocal lattice vectors of the UTe2 (011) surface, and multiple of them coexist in real space, collectively revealing a family of field-tunable, commensurate multi-q COs. These COs exist within an energy range much larger than the superconducting energy scale, their emergence suppresses the density of states near EF, yet show negligible coupling to bulk superconductivity and magnetic vortices. Our findings strongly disfavor the Fermi surface nesting or primary pair-density-wave pictures, but are consistent with a surface parent spin order.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.27211,
  title  = {Magnetic-field-tunable commensurate multi-q charge orders on UTe2 (011) surface},
  author = {Yuanji Li and Ruotong Yin and Jiashuo Gong and Dengpeng Yuan and Yuguang Wang and Shiyuan Wang and Mingzhe Li and Jiakang Zhang and Ziwei Xue and Zengyi Du and Shiyong Tan and Dong-Lai Feng and Ya-Jun Yan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27211},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 15 figures