Discovery of a Pair Density Wave State in UTe<sub>2</sub>
POSTER
Abstract
UTe2 is a promising candidate material to embody bulk topological superconductivity due to spin-triplet pairing. Moreover, the newly discovered CDW state coexisting with superconductivity in UTe2 motivates the exciting prospect that a PDW state may occur. To search for a PDW in UTe2, we visualize the pairing energy-gap with μV-scale energy resolution made possible by superconductive STM tips at subkelvin temperatures. We detect three PDWs, each with gap modulations circa 10 μeV and at incommensurate wavevectors that are indistinguishable from the wavevectors of the prevenient CDW, but with a spatial-phase difference. From these observations and given UTe2 as a spin-triplet superconductor, this PDW may presage spin-triplet pair density wave physics.
*LASSP, Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14850, USA Department of Physics, University College Cork, Cork T12 R5C, IE Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK Department of Physics, Washington University. St Louis, MO 63130, USA Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1Z8, Canada Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, D-01187 Dresden, DE Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
Publication: ArXiv: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.10859
Research Square: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2039256/v1
Submitted to Nature
Presenters
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Joseph Paul Carroll
- University College Cork