English

Unconventional nodal superconductivity in miassite Rh$_{17}$S$_{15}$

Superconductivity 2023-06-02 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

Unconventional superconductivity has long been believed to arise from a lab-grown correlated electronic system. Here we report compelling evidence of unconventional nodal superconductivity in a mineral superconductor \rhs. We investigated the temperature-dependent London penetration depth Δλ(T)\Delta\lambda(T) and disorder evolution of the critical temperature TcT_c and upper critical field Hc2(T)H_{c2}(T) in synthetic miassite \rhs. We found a power-law behavior of Δλ(T)Tn\Delta\lambda(T)\sim T^n with n1.1n\approx 1.1 at low temperatures below 0.3Tc0.3T_c (TcT_c = 5.4 K), which is consistent with the presence of lines of the node in the superconducting gap of \rhs. The nodal character of the superconducting state in \rhs~was supported by the observed pairbreaking effect in TcT_c and Hc2(T)H_{c2}(T) in samples with the controlled disorder that was introduced by low-temperature electron irradiation. We propose a nodal sign-changing superconducting gap in the A1gA_{1g} irreducible representation, which preserves the cubic symmetry of the crystal and is in excellent agreement with the superfluid density, λ2(0)/λ2(T)\lambda^2(0)/\lambda^2(T).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.00261,
  title  = {Unconventional nodal superconductivity in miassite Rh$_{17}$S$_{15}$},
  author = {Hyunsoo Kim and Makariy A. Tanatar and Marcin Kończykowski and Udhara S. Kaluarachchi and Serafim Teknowijoyo and Kyuil Cho and Aashish Sapkota and John M. Wilde and Matthew J. Krogstad and Sergey L. Bud'ko and Philip M. R. Brydon and Paul C. Canfield and Ruslan Prozorov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.00261},
  year   = {2023}
}