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Iron pnictides are the only known family of unconventional high-temperature superconductors besides cuprates. Until recently, it was widely accepted that superconductivity is spin-fluctuation driven and intimately related to their…
Josephson current between two superconductors provides a phase sensitive tool for probing their pairing symmetries. Here we fabricate and study experimentally high-quality Josephson junctions between a conventional s-wave superconductor Nb…
Multiband superconductivity, involving resonant pair scattering between different bands, has emerged as a possible explanation of some of the main characteristics of the recently discovered iron pnictides. A key feature of such interband…
We propose a modified Josephson corner-junction experiment which can test whether the order parameter in the iron pnictides changes sign between the electron and hole pockets of the Fermi surface.
We examine the nature of Josephson junction between two identical Fe-pnictides with anti-phase s-wave pairing. pi-phase shift is found if the junction barrier is thick and the two Fe-pnictides are oriented in certain directions relative to…
An essential step toward elucidating the mechanism of superconductivity is to determine the sign/phase of superconducting order parameter, as it is closely related to the pairing interaction. In conventional superconductors, the…
We examine a contact between a superconductor whose order parameter changes sign across the Brillioun zone, and an ordinary, uniform-sign superconductor. Within a Ginzburg-Landau type model, we find that if the the barrier between the two…
Since its discovery, iron-based superconductivity has been known to develop near an antiferromagnetic order, but this paradigm fails in the iron chalcogenide FeSe, whose single-layer version holds the record for the highest superconducting…
The pairing mechanism in iron-based superconductors is the subject of ongoing debate. Proximity to an antiferromagnetic phase suggests that pairing is mediated by spin fluctuations, but orbital fluctuations have also been invoked. The…
Recent experiments suggest that besides of antiferromagnetic fluctuations nematic fluctuations may contribute to the occurrence of superconductivity in iron pnictides. Motivated by this observation we study superconductivity from nematic…
Nematic order often breaks the tetragonal symmetry of iron-based superconductors. It arises from regular structural transition or electronic instability in the normal phase. Here, we report the observation of a nematic superconducting…
The nature of the pairing state in iron-based superconductors is the subject of much debate. Here we argue that in one material, the stoichiometric iron pnictide KFe2As2, there is overwhelming evidence for a d-wave pairing state,…
Electron correlations produce a rich phase diagram in the iron pnictides. Earlier theoretical studies on the correlation effect demonstrated how quantum fluctuations weaken and concurrently suppress a $C_2$-symmetric single-Q…
Insight into the electronic structure of the pnictide family of superconductors is obtained from quantum oscillation measurements. Here we review experimental quantum oscillation data that reveal a transformation from large quasi-two…
We investigate the pairing in iron pnictides in the coexistence phase, which displays both superconducting and antiferromagnetic orders. By solving the pairing problem on the Fermi surface reconstructed by long-range magnetic order, we find…
Within the Landau paradigm of continuous phase transitions, ordered states of matter are characterized by a broken symmetry. Although the broken symmetry is usually evident, determining the driving force behind the phase transition is often…
One of the major themes in the physics of condensed matter is unconventional superconductivity in correlated electronic systems. The symmetry structure of Cooper pairs is thought to be the key to the understanding of the pairing mechanism…
The discovery of the new class of pnictide superconductors has engendered a controversy about their pairing symmetry, with proposals ranging from an extended s-wave or "s$_{\pm}$" symmetry to nodal or nodeless d-wave symmetry to still more…
In many unconventional superconductors, the pairing of electrons is driven by the repulsive interaction, which leads to the sign reversal of superconducting gaps along the Fermi surfaces (FS) or between them. However, to measure this sign…
The multipocket Fermi surfaces of iron-based superconductors promote pairing states with both s_{+-}-wave and d_{x^2-y^2}-wave symmetry. We argue that the competition between these two order parameters could lead to a time-reversal-symmetry…