paper

Superconducting proximity in three dimensional Dirac materials: odd-frequency, pseudoscalar, pseudovector and tensor-valued superconducting orders

arXiv:1612.06327 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.96.134516

Abstract

We find that a conventional s-wave superconductor in proximity to three dimensional Dirac material (3DDM), to all orders of perturbation in tunneling, induces a combination of s and p-wave pairing only. We show that the Lorentz invariance of the superconducting pairing prevents the formation of Cooper pairs with higher orbital angular momenta in the 3DDM. This no-go theorem acquires stronger form when the probability of tunneling from the conventional superconductor to positive and negative energy states of 3DDM are equal. In this case all the p-wave contribution except for the lowest order, identically vanish and hence we obtain an exact result for the induced p-wave superconductivity in 3DDM. Fierz decomposing the superconducting matrix we find that temporal component of the vector superconducting order and spatial components of the pseudo-vector order are odd-frequency pairing. We find that the latter is odd with respect to exchange of position and chirality of the electrons in the Cooper pair and is spin-triplet which is necessary for NMR detection of such an exotic pseudo- vector pairing. Moreover, we show that the tensorial order breaks into a polar vector and an axial vector and both of them are conventional pairing except for being spin-triplet. According to our study, for gapless 3DDM the tensorial superconducting order will be the only order which is odd with respect to the chemical potential μ. Therefore we predict that a transverse p-n junction binds Majorana fermions. This effect can be used to control the neutral Majorana fermions with electric fields.

arXiv commentin version 2, experimental confirmation of pseudo-scalar pairing is discussed

References in corpus (26)

Cited by in corpus (10)