Ultrathin Films of Superconducting Metals as a Platform for Topological Superconductivity
Chao Lei, Hua Chen, Allan H. MacDonald
(Submitted on 15 Jan 2018)
The ingredients normally required to achieve topological superconductivity (TSC) are Cooper pairing, broken inversion symmetry, and broken time-reversal symmetry. We present a theoretical exploration of the possibility of using ultra-thin films of superconducting metals as a platform for TSC. Because they necessarily break inversion symmetry when prepared on a substrate and have intrinsic Cooper pairing, they can be TSCs when time-reversal symmetry is broken by an external magnetic field. Using microscopic density functional theory calculations we show that for ultrathin Pb and
β
-Sn superconductors the position of the Fermi level can be tuned to quasi-2D band extrema energies using strain, and that the
g
-factors of these Bloch states can be extremely large enhancing the influence of external magnetic fields.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05020
Chao Lei, Hua Chen, Allan H. MacDonald
(Submitted on 15 Jan 2018)
The ingredients normally required to achieve topological superconductivity (TSC) are Cooper pairing, broken inversion symmetry, and broken time-reversal symmetry. We present a theoretical exploration of the possibility of using ultra-thin films of superconducting metals as a platform for TSC. Because they necessarily break inversion symmetry when prepared on a substrate and have intrinsic Cooper pairing, they can be TSCs when time-reversal symmetry is broken by an external magnetic field. Using microscopic density functional theory calculations we show that for ultrathin Pb and
β
-Sn superconductors the position of the Fermi level can be tuned to quasi-2D band extrema energies using strain, and that the
g
-factors of these Bloch states can be extremely large enhancing the influence of external magnetic fields.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05020
