Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Superconducting order in organic charge transfer salts

A long-standing question for superconductivity in organic charge transfer salts concerns the symmetry of the superconducting order parameter. Is it unconventional (i.e. not s-wave) and if so are there nodes in the energy gap? Over the years there have been a wide range of claims, both theoretical and experimental.

Most recently a combined theory-STM experiment claimed the symmetry was d + s and that there were 8 nodes on the Fermi surface.

Two of my UQ colleagues recently posted a nice preprint that comes to a different conclusion.
Microwave Conductivity Distinguishes Between Different d-wave States: Umklapp Scattering in Unconventional Superconductors 
D. C. Cavanagh, B. J. Powell

Microwave conductivity experiments can directly measure the quasiparticle scattering rate in the superconducting state. We show that this, combined with knowledge of the Fermi surface geometry, allows one to distinguish between closely related superconducting order parameters, e.g., dx2y2 and dxy superconductivity. We benchmark this method on YBa2Cu3O7δ and, unsurprisingly, confirm that this is a dx2y2 superconductor. We then apply our method to κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu[N(CN)2]Br, which we discover is a dxy superconductor.
In 2005 Ben Powell  (and others) showed that the simplest RVB theory gives such an order parameter with nodes required by symmetry.
[Aside: in our paper, this is denoted d_x2-y2, but that is because of how the x-y axes are defined].

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