Magnetic Intragap States and Mixed Parity Pairing at the Edge of Spin-Triplet Superconductors

Abstract

We show that a spontaneous magnetic moment may appear at the edge of a spin-triplet superconductor if the system allows for pairing in a subdominant channel. To unveil the microscopic mechanism behind such effect we combine numerical solution of the Bogoliubov-De Gennes equations for a tight-binding model with nearest-neighbor attraction, and the symmetry based Ginzburg-Landau approach. We find that a potential barrier modulating the electronic density near the edge of the system leads to a non-unitary superconducting state close to the boundary where spin-singlet pairing coexists with the dominant triplet superconducting order. We demonstrate that the spin polarization at the edge appears due to the inhomogeneity of the non-unitary state and originates in the lifting of the spin-degeneracy of the Andreev bound-states.

5 pages, 3 figures and Supplemental material (2 pages)

References in corpus (6)

• Topological Phases of Noncentrosymmetric Superconductors: Edge States, Majorana Fermions, and the Non-Abelian Statistics
• Types of topological surface states in nodal noncentrosymmetric superconductors
• Andreev Reflection in Heavy-Fermion Superconductors and Order Parameter Symmetry in CeCoIn_5
• Surface bound states and spin currents in non-centrosymmetric superconductors
• Properties of edge states in spin-triplet two-band superconductor
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Inter-orbital topological superconductivity in spin-orbit coupled superconductors with inversion symmetry breaking
• Tuning between singlet, triplet, and mixed pairing states in an extended Hubbard chain
• Topological signatures of the coexistence of antiferromagnetism and odd-parity spin-triplet superconductivity
• Control of magnetism in singlet-triplet superconducting heterostructures
• Interface currents and magnetization in singlet-triplet superconducting heterostructures: Role of chiral and helical domains
• Electron transport in p-wave superconductor-normal metal junctions
• Magnetic exchange interaction in spin-valve with chiral spin-triplet superconductor