English

Superconductivity in non-centrosymmetric rhombohedral NbSe2

Superconductivity 2026-01-27 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Materials Science

Abstract

Crystal stacking offers a powerful yet underexplored route to engineer symmetry in layered superconductors. Here we report superconductivity in rhombohedral-stacked NbSe2 (3R-NbSe2), a non-centrosymmetric polytype in which global inversion symmetry is removed by stacking alone. Using comprehensive structural, transport, magnetic, and thermodynamic measurements, we establish superconductivity as a bulk property of the 3R phase and find that the in-plane upper critical field exceeds the Pauli paramagnetic limit, indicating the persistence of strong Ising-type spin-orbit coupling. Unlike the thickness-dependent superconductivity in centrosymmetric 2H-NbSe2, the superconducting transition temperature in 3R-NbSe2 shows little dependence on layer number but exhibits an unusually strong sensitivity to disorder. We further observe strongly enhanced nonlinear optical and electrical responses near the superconducting transition, consistent with stacking-induced inversion-symmetry breaking. Our results identify 3R-NbSe2 as a single-phase platform in which stacking engineering reshapes superconductivity and enables nonlinear transport phenomena in layered materials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.16475,
  title  = {Superconductivity in non-centrosymmetric rhombohedral NbSe2},
  author = {Zhengxian Li and Xiaoyu Shen and Kai Liu and Yating Sha and Tianyang Wang and Feng Liu and Qingchen Duan and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Peng Chen and Shiyong Wang and Ruidan Zhong and Dong Qian and Shengwei Jiang and Yufan Li and Noah F. Q. Yuan and Guorui Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16475},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:16:50.243Z