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Deciphering Chiral Superconductivity via Impurity Bound States

Superconductivity 2025-07-18 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Determining the symmetry of Cooper pairs remains a central challenge in the study of unconventional superconductors, particularly for chiral states that spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry. Here we demonstrate that point-like impurities in chiral superconductors generate in-gap bound states with a distinctive asymmetry: the local density of states at the impurity site vanishes at one bound-state energy, but not at its particle-hole conjugate. We prove this behavior analytically in generic two-dimensional, single-band chiral superconductors, showing it arises from a fundamental interplay between pairing chirality and crystalline rotation symmetry. Our numerical simulations confirm that this diagnostic feature persists in multiband systems and for spatially extended impurities. Our results establish a symmetry-enforced real-space diagnostic for chiral superconductivity at the atomic scale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.20842,
  title  = {Deciphering Chiral Superconductivity via Impurity Bound States},
  author = {Yuchang Cai and Rui-Xing Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.20842},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 + 7 pages, 4 + 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:33:44.237Z