English

Superfluid stiffness of twisted multilayer graphene superconductors

Superconductivity 2024-06-21 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

The robustness of the macroscopic quantum nature of a superconductor can be characterized by the superfluid stiffness, ρs\rho_s, a quantity that describes the energy required to vary the phase of the macroscopic quantum wave function. In unconventional superconductors, such as cuprates, the low-temperature behavior of ρs\rho_s drastically differs from that of conventional superconductors due to quasiparticle excitations from gapless points (nodes) in momentum space. Intensive research on the recently discovered magic-angle twisted graphene family has revealed, in addition to superconducting states, strongly correlated electronic states associated with spontaneously broken symmetries, inviting the study of ρs\rho_s to uncover the potentially unconventional nature of its superconductivity. Here we report the measurement of ρs\rho_s in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (TTG), revealing unconventional nodal-gap superconductivity. Utilizing radio-frequency reflectometry techniques to measure the kinetic inductive response of superconducting TTG coupled to a microwave resonator, we find a linear temperature dependence of ρs\rho_s at low temperatures and nonlinear Meissner effects in the current bias dependence, both indicating nodal structures in the superconducting order parameter. Furthermore, the doping dependence shows a linear correlation between the zero temperature ρs\rho_s and the superconducting transition temperature TcT_c, reminiscent of Uemura's relation in cuprates, suggesting phase-coherence-limited superconductivity. Our results provide strong evidence for nodal superconductivity in TTG and put strong constraints on the mechanisms of these graphene-based superconductors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.13742,
  title  = {Superfluid stiffness of twisted multilayer graphene superconductors},
  author = {Abhishek Banerjee and Zeyu Hao and Mary Kreidel and Patrick Ledwith and Isabelle Phinney and Jeong Min Park and Andrew M. Zimmerman and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Robert M Westervelt and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Pavel A. Volkov and Ashvin Vishwanath and Kin Chung Fong and Philip Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.13742},
  year   = {2024}
}