Abstract
Van der Waals materials offer unprecedented control of electronic properties via stacking of different types of two-dimensional materials. A fascinating frontier, largely unexplored, is the stacking of strongly correlated phases of matter. We study 4Hb-TaS2, which naturally realizes an alternating stacking of 1T-TaS2 and 1H-TaS2 structures. The former is a well-known Mott insulator, which has recently been proposed to host a gapless spin-liquid ground state. The latter is a superconductor known to also host a competing charge density wave state. This raises the question of how these two components affect each other when stacked together. We find a superconductor with a Tc of 2.7 Kelvin and anomalous properties, of which the most notable one is a signature of time-reversal symmetry breaking, abruptly appearing at the superconducting transition. This observation is consistent with a chiral superconducting state.
Original language | English |
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Article number | eaax9480 |
Journal | Science advances |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 13 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
Funding
This work was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (work at the Technion under grant no. 320/17, work at Tel-Aviv University under grant no. 382/17 and work at Bar-Ilan university under grant no. 994/19).
Funders | Funder number |
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Israel Science Foundation | |
Tel Aviv University | 382/17, 994/19 |
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology | 320/17 |