English

Surface-localized topological superconductivity in nodal-loop materials: BdG analysis

Superconductivity 2026-03-23 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We theoretically study surface superconductivity in a nodal-line semimetal by combining a minimal tight-binding model with a layer-resolved Bogoliubov-de Gennes approach. In the normal state, the model realizes a bulk nodal loop and an associated drumhead surface band in a slab geometry with open boundaries in the zz direction: the central layers reproduce the bulk-like density of states, whereas the surface layer exhibits a sharp zero-energy peak originating from the drumhead states. On top of this band structure we introduce chiral pp-wave and dx2y2d_{x^2-y^2}-wave superconducting channels and determine the layer-dependent gap amplitudes self-consistently. The chiral pp-wave order parameter is strongly enhanced at the outermost layers and decays within only a few layers towards the interior, while the dd-wave order parameter is more than an order of magnitude smaller on all layers. The quasiparticle dispersion and surface local density of states in the chiral pp-wave state show that the drumhead band is efficiently gapped out and that the zero-energy peak in the normal surface spectrum is split into two coherence peaks, directly reflecting the induced superconducting gap. These results demonstrate that superconductivity driven by drumhead surface states is naturally biased toward a surface-localized chiral pp-wave pairing symmetry and may offer qualitative guidance for interpreting surface-sensitive experiments on Pd-doped CaAgP.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.22837,
  title  = {Surface-localized topological superconductivity in nodal-loop materials: BdG analysis},
  author = {Takeru Matsushima and Hiroki Tsuchiura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.22837},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to the Proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Superconductivity (ISS2025); Accepted by conference editor. Revised version incorporating changes requested during conditional acceptance; figure labels were enlarged and references were added

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:53:39.309Z