Multiphase superconductivity in PdBi2
arXiv:2411.09239 · doi:10.1038/s41467-024-54867-x
Abstract
Unconventional superconductivity, where electron pairing does not involve electron-phonon interactions, is often attributed to magnetic correlations in a material. Well known examples include high-T_c cuprates and uranium-based heavy fermion superconductors. Less explored are unconventional superconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling, where interactions between spin-polarised electrons and external magnetic field can result in multiple superconducting phases and field-induced transitions between them, a rare phenomenon in the superconducting state. Here we report a magnetic-field driven phase transition in β-PdBi2, a layered non-magnetic superconductor. Our tunnelling spectroscopy on thin PdBi2 monocrystals incorporated in planar superconductor-insulator-normal metal junctions reveals a marked discontinuity in the superconducting properties with increasing in-plane field, which is consistent with a transition from conventional (s-wave) to nodal pairing. Our theoretical analysis suggests that this phase transition may arise from spin polarisation and spin-momentum locking caused by locally broken inversion symmetry, with p-wave pairing becoming energetically favourable in high fields. Our findings also reconcile earlier predictions of unconventional multigap superconductivity in β-PdBi2 with previous experiments where only a single s-wave gap could be detected.
29 pages, including 4 main Figures, Methods, 8 Supplementary Figures and 5 Supplementary Notes
References in corpus (28)
- Evidence of Ising pairing in superconducting NbSe atomic layers
- Scanning tunneling spectroscopy of high-temperature superconductors
- Superconducting 2D system with lifted spin degeneracy: Mixed singlet-triplet state
- Two Dimensional Ising Superconductivity in Gated MoS
- The hot pick-up technique for batch assembly of van der Waals heterostructures
- Spontaneously polarized half-gapped superconductivity
- Superconductivity protected by spin-valley locking in ion-gated MoS2
- Hidden spin polarization in inversion-symmetric bulk crystals
- Tuning Ising superconductivity with layer and spin-orbit coupling in two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides
- The Order Parameter for the Superconducting Phases of UPt
- Properties of the Ideal Ginzburg-Landau Vortex Lattice
- Extreme magnetic field-boosted superconductivity
- Topological superconductivity in bilayer Rashba system
- Field-induced transition from even to odd parity superconductivity in CeRhAs
- Topologically protected surface states in a centrosymmetric superconductor beta-PdBi2
- Extremely Large and Anisotropic Upper Critical Field and the Ferromagnetic Instability in UCoGe
- Unusual suppression of the superconducting energy gap and critical temperature in atomically thin NbSe2
- Unconventional superconductivity in bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides
- Superconductivity and Local Inversion-Symmetry Breaking
- Superconductivity at 5.4 K in -BiPd
- Magnetic field dependence of the density of states in the multiband superconductor -BiPd
- Observation of antiferromagnetic order as odd-parity multipoles inside the superconducting phase in CeRhAs
- Single gap superconductivity in beta-Bi2Pd
- Even-odd parity transition in strongly correlated locally noncentrosymmetric superconductors : An application to CeRhAs
- Fully gapped superconductivity in the topological superconductor beta-PdBi2
- Electron-phonon coupling and pairing mechanism in --BiPd centrosymmetric superconductor
- Decoupling multi-phase superconductivity from normal state ordering in CeRhAs
- Theory of spin-polarized superconductors -- an analogue of superfluid He A-phase