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) and disorder evolution of the critical temperature Tc and upper critical field Hc2(T) in synthetic miassite \rhs. We found a power-law behavior of Δλ(T)∼Tn with n≈1.1 at low temperatures below 0.3Tc (Tc = 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 Tc and Hc2(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 A1g irreducible representation, which preserves the cubic symmetry of the crystal and is in excellent agreement with the superfluid density, λ2(0)/λ2(T).
@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}
}