Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Biswas, P. K.
• Ghosh, S. K.
• Zhao, J. Z.
• Mayoh, D. A.
• Zhigadlo, N. D.
• Xu, Xiaofeng
• Baines, C.
• Hillier, A. D.
• Balakrishnan, G.
• Lees, M. R.

Titel

Chiral singlet superconductivity in the weakly correlated metal LaPt3P

Ist Teil von

• Nature communications, 2021-05, Vol.12 (1), p.2504-2504, Article 2504

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Abstract Chiral superconductors are novel topological materials with finite angular momentum Cooper pairs circulating around a unique chiral axis, thereby spontaneously breaking time-reversal symmetry. They are rather scarce and usually feature triplet pairing: a canonical example is the chiral p -wave state realized in the A -phase of superfluid He 3 . Chiral triplet superconductors are, however, topologically fragile with the corresponding gapless boundary modes only weakly protected against symmetry-preserving perturbations in contrast to their singlet counterparts. Using muon spin relaxation measurements, here we report that the weakly correlated pnictide compound LaPt 3 P has the two key features of a chiral superconductor: spontaneous magnetic fields inside the superconducting state indicating broken time-reversal symmetry and low temperature linear behaviour in the superfluid density indicating line nodes in the order parameter. Using symmetry analysis, first principles band structure calculation and mean-field theory, we unambiguously establish that the superconducting ground state of LaPt 3 P is a chiral d -wave singlet.