English

Quasiparticle Interference and Symmetry of Superconducting Order Parameter in Strongly Electron-Doped Iron-based Superconductors

Superconductivity 2019-08-16 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Motivated by recent experimental reports of significant spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and a sign-changing order-parameter in the Li1x_{1-x}Fex_x(OHFe)1y_{1-y}Zny_ySe superconductor with only electron pockets present, we study the possible Cooper-pairing symmetries and their quasiparticle interference (QPI) signatures. We find that each of the resulting states - ss-wave, dd-wave and helical pp-wave - can have a fully gapped density of states (DOS) consistent with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments and, due to spin-orbit coupling, are a mixture of spin singlet and triplet components leading to intra- and inter-band features in the QPI signal. Analyzing predicted QPI patterns we find that only the spin-triplet dominated even parity A1gA_{1g} (s-wave) and B2gB_{2g} (d-wave) pairing states are consistent with the experimental data. Additionally, we show that these states can indeed be realized in a microscopic model with atomic-like interactions and study their possible signatures in spin-resolved STM experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.05935,
  title  = {Quasiparticle Interference and Symmetry of Superconducting Order Parameter in Strongly Electron-Doped Iron-based Superconductors},
  author = {Jakob Böker and Pavel A. Volkov and Peter J. Hirschfeld and Ilya Eremin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.05935},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

14 pages, 11 figures