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Superconductivity in spin-orbit coupled semimetals

The discovery of superconductivity in the j=3/2 spin-orbit coupled half-Heusler semimetals has given the field of low-density superconductivity a new twist. Exotic pairings are likely, yet the favored superconducting instabilities remain to be determined. We provide a method to analyze superconductivity in systems with symmetry-protected band touchings. We apply the latter to j=3/2 systems to find that polar phonons play an important role in the superconducting mechanism of the half-Heusler compounds. We also explicitly show a number of new features associated with such band structures, such as the strong dependence on hole or electron doping in the determination of the leading odd-parity superconducting instability.

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Superconductivity in Spin-Orbit Coupled Semimetals

  • PRB (Editor's suggestion): Phys. Rev. B 96, 214514 (28 Dec. 2017)
  • arXiv: arxiv:1707.03831 (13 July 2017)
  • accepted by Phys. Rev. B (6 Dec. 2017)
  • Talk at the APS March Meeting 2018 (9 Mar. 2018): pdf
  • Talk at "Conference on topological phases and topological quantum computation", Hong-Kong (Dec. 2017)
  • Talk at KITP (Aug. 2017): video, pdf
  • Talk at ISSP (Feb. 2017): video, pdf

Pairing states of spin-3/2 fermions: Symmetry-enforced topological gap functions

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Superconductivity in Spin-Orbit Coupled Semimetals

@article{PhysRevB.96.214514,
title = {Superconductivity in three-dimensional spin-orbit coupled semimetals},
author = {Savary, Lucile and Ruhman, Jonathan and Venderbos, J\"orn W. F. and Fu, Liang and Lee, Patrick A.},
journal = {Phys. Rev. B},
volume = {96},
issue = {21},
pages = {214514},
numpages = {16},
year = {2017},
month = {Dec},
publisher = {American Physical Society},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.96.214514},
url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.96.214514}
}

Pairing states of spin-3/2 fermions: Symmetry-enforced topological gap functions

@article{arxiv1709.04487,
title = {Pairing states of spin-3/2 fermions: Symmetry-enforced topological gap functions},
author = {Venderbos, J.W.F. and Savary, L. and Ruhman, J. and Lee, P.A. and Fu, L.},
journal = {arXiv},
eprint = {1709.04487},
year = {2017},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04487}
}