English

Superconductivity in a two-dimensional repulsive Rashba gas at low electron density

Superconductivity 2017-09-15 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study the superconducting instability and the resulting superconducting states in a two-dimensional repulsive Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling at low electron density (namely the Fermi energy EFE_F is lower than the energy ERE_R of the Dirac point induced by Rashba coupling). We find that superconductivity is enhanced as the dimensionless Fermi energy ϵF\epsilon_F (ϵFEF/ER\epsilon_F\equiv E_F/E_R) decreases, due to the following two reasons. First, the density of states at ϵF\epsilon_F increases as 1/ϵF1/\sqrt{\epsilon_F}. Second, the particle-hole bubble becomes more anisotropic, resulting in an increasing effective attraction. The superconducting state is always in the total angular momentum jz=+2j_z=+2 (or jz=2j_z=-2) channel with Chern number C=4C=4 (or C=4C=-4), breaking time reversal symmetry spontaneously. Although a putative Leggett mode is expected due to the two-gap nature of the superconductivity, we find that it is always damped. More importantly, once a sufficiently large Zeeman coupling is applied to the superconducting state, the Chern number can be tuned to be ±1\pm1 and Majorana zero modes exist in the vortex cores.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.06613,
  title  = {Superconductivity in a two-dimensional repulsive Rashba gas at low electron density},
  author = {Luyang Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.06613},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages + supplemental material

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:29:22.860Z