Superconductivity from Coulomb repulsion in three-dimensional quadratic band touching Luttinger semimetals

Abstract

We study superconductivity driven by screened Coulomb repulsion in three-dimensional Luttinger semimetals with a quadratic band touching and strong spin-orbit coupling. In these semimetals, the Cooper pairs are formed by spin-3/2 fermions with non-trivial wavefunctions. We numerically solve the linear Eliashberg equation to obtain the critical temperature of a singlet s-wave gap function as a function of doping, with account of spin-orbit and self-energy corrections. In order to understand the underlying mechanism of superconductivity, we compute the sensitivity of the critical temperature to changes in the dielectric function $\epsilon (i{\Omega }_n,q)$. We relate our results to the plasmon and Kohn-Luttinger mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the validity of our approach and compare our results to the litterature. We find good agreement with some bismuth-based half-Heuslers, such as YPtBi, and speculate on superconductivity in the iridate Pr2Ir2O7.

17 pages, 6 figures ; published version

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Infrared fixed points of higher-spin fermions in topological semimetals