The Emergence of Superconductivity in Heavy Electron Materials

Abstract

Although the pairing glue for the attractive quasiparticle interaction responsible for unconventional superconductivity in heavy electron materials has been identified as the spin fluctuations that arise from their proximity to a magnetic quantum critical point, there has been no model to describe their superconducting transition at Tc that is comparable to that found by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (BCS) for conventional superconductors where phonons provide the pairing glue. Here we propose a phenomenological BCS-like expression for Tc in heavy electron materials, that is based on the unusual properties of the heavy electron normal state from which superconductivity emerges, and a simple model for the effective range and strength of the spin-fluctuation-induced quasiparticle interaction. We show that it provides both a physical explanation and the first quantitative understanding of the pressure-induced variation of Tc in the "hydrogen atoms" of unconventional superconductivity, CeCoIn5 and CeRhIn5, and predicts scaling behavior and a dome-like structure for Tc in all heavy electron quantum critical superconductors.

21 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (9)

• Hidden Magnetism and Quantum Criticality in the Heavy Fermion Superconductor CeRhIn5
• Spin resonance in the d-wave superconductor CeCoIn5
• Reversible Tuning of the Heavy Fermion Ground State in CeCoIn${}_5$
• Universal Behavior in Heavy Electron Materials
• Interacting Antiferromagnetic Droplets in Quantum Critical CeCoIn_5
• Pressure Study of Quantum Criticality in CeCoIn5
• Long range order and two-fluid behavior in heavy electron materials
• Magnetic excitations in Kondo liquid: Superconductivity and Hidden Magnetic Quantum Critical Fluctuations
• Quantum critical behavior in heavy electron materials

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• Multipole-fluctuation pairing mechanism of $d_{x^2-y^2}+ig$ superconductivity in Sr${}_2$RuO${}_4$
• A Simple Solvable Model for Heavy Fermion Superconductivity from the Two-Fluid Normal State
• Nonlocal Kondo effect and two-fluid picture revealed in an exactly solvable model
• An emerging global picture of heavy fermion physics