Momentum-space imaging of Cooper pairing in a half-Dirac-gas topological superconductor
By Su-Yang Xu, N. Alidoust, I. Belopolski, Anthony Richardella, Chang Liu, M. Neupane, G. Bian, Song-Hsun Huang, R. Sankar, Chen Fang and 7 more. Nature Physics, 2014
147 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Superconductivity involving topological Dirac electrons has recently been proposed as a platform between concepts in high-energy and condensed-matter physics. It has been predicted that supersymmetry and Majorana fermions, both of which remain elusive in particle physics, may be realized through emergent particles in these particular superconducting systems. Using artificially fabricated topological-insulator–superconductor heterostructures, we present direct spectroscopic evidence for the existence of Cooper pairing in a weakly interacting half Dirac gas. Our studies reveal that two dimensional topological superconductivity in a helical Dirac gas is distinctly different from that in an ordinary two-dimensional superconductor in terms of the spin degrees of freedom of electrons. We further show that the pairing of Dirac electrons can be suppressed by time-reversal symmetry-breaking impurities, thereby removing the distinction. Our demonstration and momentum-space imaging of Cooper pairing in a half-Dirac-gas two-dimensional topological superconductor serve as a critically important platform for future testing of fundamental physics predictions such as emergent supersymmetry and topological quantum criticality. Supersymmetry and Majorana fermions that are their own antiparticles are both concepts from particle physics that may become testable in condensed-matter systems. The observation of Cooper pairs in a helical Dirac gas brings this goal a step closer.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19b234ffb9d3d7a5cee93f505787808295675a0e
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Citations in the corpus
- Topological insulators, topological superconductors and Weyl fermion semimetals: discoveries, perspectives and outlooks (2015, background): “(d), A 2D color plot showing Rxx as a function of magnetic field B and backgate voltage Vbg measured at 0.35 K. (Adapted from D Hsieh et al 2009 Nature 460 1101 [33]; Xu et al 2014 Nat.”
- Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, unknown): “Several ARPES works supported the existence of topological states with the observation of surface states within the bulk Kondo gap (Jiang et al., 2013; Neupane et al., 2013; Xu et al., 2013b) which are spin-polarized (Xu et al., 2014a).”