Topological nodal -wave superconductivity in PtBi
arXiv:2507.01774 · doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09712-6
Abstract
Most superconducting materials are well-understood and conventional in the sense that the pairs of electrons that cause the superconductivity by their condensation have the highest possible symmetry. Famous exceptions are the enigmatic high- cuprate superconductors. Nodes in their superconducting gap are the fingerprint of their unconventional character and imply superconducting pairing of -wave symmetry. Here, using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we observe that the Weyl semimetal PtBi harbors nodes in its superconducting gap, implying unconventional -wave pairing symmetry. At temperatures below , the superconductivity in PtBi gaps out its topological surface states, the Fermi arcs, while its bulk states remain normal. The nodes in the superconducting gap that we observe are located exactly at the center of the Fermi arcs, and imply the presence of topologically protected Majorana cones around this locus in momentum space. From this, we infer theoretically that robust zero-energy Majorana flat bands emerge at surface step edges. This not only establishes PtBi surfaces as unconventional, topological -wave superconductors but also as a promising material platform in the ongoing effort to generate and manipulate Majorana bound states.
3 figures embedded
References in corpus (28)
- Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of the cuprate superconductors
- Classification of topological insulators and superconductors in three spatial dimensions
- Spontaneously polarized half-gapped superconductivity
- Electronic structure of quantum materials studied by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy
- The Order Parameter for the Superconducting Phases of UPt
- Energy gaps in high-transition temperature cuprate superconductors
- Topological Quantum Computation Based on Chiral Majorana Fermions
- Topology of Andreev Bound States with Flat Dispersion
- Unconventional Superconductivity
- Topologically protected surface states in a centrosymmetric superconductor beta-PdBi2
- Possible topologically non-trivial superconducting order parameter in type-II Weyl semimetal T_d-MoTe_2
- Point Node Gap Structure of Spin-Triplet Superconductor UTe2
- Topologically stable gapless phases of time-reversal invariant superconductors
- Possibility of f-wave spin-triplet superconductivity in the CoO superconductor: a case study on a 2D triangular lattice in the repulsive Hubbard model
- Polymorphic PtBi2: Growth, structure and superconducting properties
- Superconducting Arcs
- Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the type-I Weyl semimetal PtBi
- Superconducting phase with a chiral -wave pairing symmetry and Majorana fermions induced in a hole-doped semiconductor
- Gapless Fermions and Quantum Order
- Surface superconductivity in the topological Weyl semimetal t-PtBi
- Fully gapped superconductivity in the topological superconductor beta-PdBi2
- Symmetry, nodal structure, and Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces for nonlocal pairing
- Braiding higher-order Majorana corner states through their spin degree of freedom
- Transport evidence for three dimensional topological superconductivity in doped -PdBi
- Electronic structure of the surface superconducting Weyl semimetal PtBi
- Fermi surface tomography
- Chemical Principles of Intrinsic Topological Superconductors
- Towards Scalable Braiding: Topological Superconductivity Unlocked under Arbitrary Magnetic Field Directions in Curved Planar Josephson Junctions