PROGRAM

Virtual Long Range Colloquium, Vidya Madhavan on "Microscopic evidence for a chiral superconducting order parameter in the heavy fermion superconductor UTe₂"

Date:

Time:

19:30 hrs

Location:

on-line

 

You are invited to attend the virtual Long Range Colloquium organized by the Virtual Science Forum. This is a bi-weekly colloquium focusing on condensed matter in physics and quantum information. The next three speakers are Vidya Mahavan (University of Illinois), Nicola Spandin (ETH Zurich) and Klaus Molmer (Aarhus university).

The upcoming talk by Vidya Mahavan on 'Microscopic evidence for a chiral superconducting order parameter in the heavy fermion superconductor UTe₂, is going to take place Wednesday 13 May  at 19:30. If you want to attend, please register (the attendance is open to everyone and free).

Anton Akhmerov,On behalf of the VSF organizers

 

Outline of the presentation:

Spin-triplet superconductivity is a condensate of electron pairs with spin-1 and an odd-parity wavefunction. A particularly interesting manifestation of triplet pairing is a chiral p-wave state which is topologically non-trivial and a natural platform for realizing Majorana edge modes. Triplet pairing is however rare in solid state systems. The best-known example of chiral spin-triplet paring is the superfluid 3He-A phase and over the last few decades, there has been an intensive search for potential spin-triplet superconductors in solid-state systems. Since pairing is most naturally mediated by ferromagnetic spin fluctuations, uranium based heavy fermion systems containing f-electron elements that can harbor both strong correlations and magnetism are considered ideal candidate spin-triplet superconductors. In this work I will present scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) data on the newly discovered heavy fermion superconductor, $\textrm{UTe}2$ with a $T{\textrm{SC}}$ of 1.6K. I will show signatures of coexisting Kondo effect and superconductivity which show competing spatial modulations within one unit-cell. STM spectroscopy at step edges show signatures of chiral in-gap states, predicted to exist at the boundaries of a topological superconductor. Combined with existing data indicating triplet pairing, the presence of chiral edge states suggests that UTe2 is a strong candidate material for chiral-triplet topological superconductivity.

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