Anomalous Normal Fluid Response in a Chiral Superconductor UTe₂

Author

Seokjin Bae
Hyunsoo Kim, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyFollow
Yun Suk Eo
Sheng Ran
I. lin Liu
Wesley T. Fuhrman
Johnpierre Paglione
Nicholas P. Butch
Steven M. Anlage

Abstract

Chiral superconductors have been proposed as one pathway to realize Majorana normal fluid at its boundary. However, the long-sought 2D and 3D chiral superconductors with edge and surface Majorana normal fluid are yet to be conclusively found. Here, we report evidence for a chiral spin-triplet pairing state of UTe₂ with surface normal fluid response. The microwave surface impedance of the UTe₂ crystal was measured and converted to complex conductivity, which is sensitive to both normal and superfluid responses. The anomalous residual normal fluid conductivity supports the presence of a significant normal fluid response. The superfluid conductivity follows the temperature behavior predicted for an axial spin-triplet state, which is further narrowed down to a chiral spin-triplet state with evidence of broken time-reversal symmetry. Further analysis excludes trivial origins for the observed normal fluid response. Our findings suggest that UTe₂ can be a new platform to study exotic topological excitations in higher dimension.

Recommended Citation

S. Bae et al., "Anomalous Normal Fluid Response in a Chiral Superconductor UTe₂," Nature Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, article no. 2644, Nature Research, Dec 2021.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22906-6

Department(s)

Physics

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant DMR-1410712

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2041-1723

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2021 The Authors, All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publication Date

01 Dec 2021

PubMed ID

33976162