English

Superconductivity from piezoelectric interactions in Weyl semimetals

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2019-07-10 v2

Abstract

We present an analytical low-energy theory of piezoelectric electron-phonon interactions in undoped Weyl semimetals, taking into account also Coulomb interactions. We show that piezoelectric interactions generate a long-range attractive potential between Weyl fermions. This potential comes with a characteristic angular anisotropy. From the one-loop renormalization group approach and a mean-field analysis, we predict that superconducting phases with either conventional s-wave singlet pairing or nodal-line triplet pairing could be realized for sufficiently strong piezoelectric coupling. For small couplings, we show that the quasi-particle decay rate exhibits a linear temperature dependence where the prefactor vanishes only in a logarithmic manner as the quasi-particle energy approaches the Weyl point. For practical estimates, we consider the Weyl semimetal TaAs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.06433,
  title  = {Superconductivity from piezoelectric interactions in Weyl semimetals},
  author = {Rodrigo G. Pereira and Francesco Buccheri and Alessandro De Martino and Reinhold Egger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.06433},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures. v2: typo corrected, comments about disorder and a separate section for quasi-particle lifetime added. Accepted version