Time-reversal symmetry breaking phase and gapped surface states in d-wave nanoscale superconductors

Abstract

We solve the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations self-consistently for d-wave superconductors with [110] surfaces. We find spontaneous breaking of time-reversal symmetry (TRS) caused by the spontaneous occurrence of a complex order parameter with an extended s-wave symmetry along the [110] surfaces. In the TRS-breaking phase, the d-wave order parameter itself becomes complex. We also show that vortex-antivortex pairs can appear along the [110] surfaces of nanoribbons. These pairs are detectable with surface sensitive probes.

6 pages 4 figures, to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Proceedings of LT28, Gothenburg, Sweden, 9-16 Aug. 2017)

References in corpus (5)

• Quantized Anomalous Hall Effect in Magnetic Topological Insulators
• Spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry in high-temperature superconductors
• Broken translational and time-reversal symmetry in superconducting films
• Reduced-Shifted Conjugate-Gradient Method for a Green's Function: Efficient Numerical Approach in a Nano-structured Superconductor
• Time-reversal symmetry breaking and gapped surface states due to spontaneous emergence of new order in $d$-wave nanoislands

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Enhanced chiral edge currents and orbital magnetic moment in chiral $d$-wave superconductors from mesoscopic finite-size effects