English

Singlet-Quintet Mixing in Spin-Orbit Coupled Superconductors with j=3/2 Fermions

Superconductivity 2018-10-03 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

In non-centrosymmetric superconductors, spin-orbit coupling can induce an unconventional superconducting state with a mixture of s-wave spin-singlet and p-wave spin-triplet channels, which leads to a variety of exotic phenomena, including anisotropic upper critical field, magnetoelectric effect, topological superconductivity, et al. It is commonly thought that inversion symmetry breaking is substantial for pairing-mixed superconducting states. In this work, we theoretically propose that a new type of pairing-mixed state, namely the mixture of s-wave spin-singlet and d-wave spin-quintet channels, can be induced by spin-orbit coupling even in the presence of inversion symmetry when electrons effectively carry "spin-3/2" in superconductors. As a physical consequence of the singlet-quintet pairing mixing, topological nodal-line superconductivity is found in such system and gives rise to flat surface Majorana bands. Our work provides a possible explanation of unconventional superconducting behaviors observed in superconducting half-Heusler compounds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.00083,
  title  = {Singlet-Quintet Mixing in Spin-Orbit Coupled Superconductors with j=3/2 Fermions},
  author = {Jiabin Yu and Chao-Xing Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.00083},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

28 pages, 8 figures. Updated version: cited more references and added Sec.C8 to the appendix