Chiral superconductivity in the alternate stacking compound 4Hb-TaS2

A. Ribak, R. Majlin Skiff, M. Mograbi, P. K. Rout, M. H. Fischer, J. Ruhman, K. Chashka, Y. Dagan, A. Kanigel

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89 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish
Article numbereaax9480
JournalScience advances
Volume6
Issue number13
DOIs
StatePublished - 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).

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation
Tel Aviv University382/17, 994/19
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology320/17

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