English

Superconductivity from phonon-mediated retardation in a single-flavor metal

Superconductivity 2026-01-01 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study phonon-mediated pairings in a single-flavor metal with a tunable Berry curvature. In the absence of Berry curvature, we discover an unexpected possibility: pp-wave superconductivity emerging purely from the retardation effect, while the static BCS approximation fails to predict its existence. The gap function exhibits sign-change behavior in frequency (owing to the dynamical structure of the phonon-mediated interaction in the pp-wave channel), and TcT_c obeys a BCS-like scaling. We further show that the Berry curvature stabilizes the chiral pp-wave superconductivity and can induce transitions to higher-angular-momentum pairings. Our results establish that the phonon-mediated mechanism is a viable pairing candidate in single-flavor systems, such as the quarter-metal superconductivity observed in rhombohedral graphene multilayers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.23790,
  title  = {Superconductivity from phonon-mediated retardation in a single-flavor metal},
  author = {Yang-Zhi Chou and Jihang Zhu and Jay D. Sau and Sankar Das Sarma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23790},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6+5 pages, 4+1 figures