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.

arXiv comment21 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (18)

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• Toward a New Microscopic Framework for Kondo Lattice Materials
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• Two types of superconducting domes in unconventional superconductors
• Possible nodeless $s^{\pm }$-wave superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene
• Interplay of localized and itinerant behavior in the one-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model
• Quantum critical scaling and superconductivity in heavy electron materials
• Multipole-fluctuation pairing mechanism of $d_{x^2-y^2}+ig$ superconductivity in Sr${}_2$RuO${}_4$
• First-principles calculations of the magnetic and electronic structures of MnP under pressure
• Differential Conductance and Defect States in the Heavy Fermion Superconductor CeCoIn${}_5$
• Evolution of Magnetic Order from the Localized to the Itinerant Limit
• Nearly-degenerate $p_x+i{p}_y$ and $d_{x^2-y^2}$ pairing symmetry in the heavy fermion superconductor YbRh${}_2$Si${}_2$
• Superconductivity of the FeSe/SrTiO3 Interface in the View of BCS-BEC Crossover
• A Simple Solvable Model for Heavy Fermion Superconductivity from the Two-Fluid Normal State
• An emerging global picture of heavy fermion physics
• Nonlocal Kondo effect and two-fluid picture revealed in an exactly solvable model
• Novel attractive pairing interaction in strongly correlated superconductors