Phase-sensitive evidence for 2x2 pair density wave in a kagome superconductor
Abstract
The pair-density-wave (PDW) exhibits periodic amplitude and sign modulations of the superconducting order parameter. Such a pairing state has been proposed to be sensitive to nonmagnetic scattering. In this work, we observe the nonmagnetic PDW-breaking effect in a kagome superconductor, using scanning tunneling microscopy. We observe 2x2 PDW induced by the coupling between charge order and superconductivity. The global PDW is substantially suppressed upon doping the kagome lattice with dilute isovalent nonmagnetic impurities, whereas the charge order and uniform superconductivity remain robust. Spatial correlation analysis further confirms that PDW is distinctly suppressed near dopants. We attribute the PDW suppression to a nonmagnetic PDW breaking effect, arising from phase sign modulation of PDW in the kagome d-orbital hosting Bogoliubov Fermi states.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.10958,
title = {Phase-sensitive evidence for 2x2 pair density wave in a kagome superconductor},
author = {Xiao-Yu Yan and Guowei Liu and Hanbin Deng and Xitong Xu and Haiyang Ma and Hailang Qin and Jun-Yi Zhang and Yuanyuan Zhao and Haitian Zhao and Zhe Qu and Yigui Zhong and Kozo Okazaki and Xiquan Zheng and Yingying Peng and Zurab Guguchia and X. X. Wu and Qianghua Wang and X-H Fan and Wei Song and M-W Gao and Hendrik Hohmann and Matteo Durrnagel and Ronny Thomale and Jia-Xin Yin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10958},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 5 figures; Supplementary Material included; updated to match the published version