Abstract
With the groundbreaking work of Fulde, Ferrell, Larkin and Ovchinnikov, it was realized that superconducting order can also break translational invariance, leading to a phase in which the Cooper pairs develop a coherent periodic spatially oscillating structure. Such pair-density-wave (PDW) superconductivity has become relevant in a diverse range of systems, including cuprates, organic superconductors, heavy-fermion superconductors, cold atoms and high-density quark matter. Here we show that, in addition to charge-density-wave (CDW) order, there are PDW ground states that induce spin-density-wave (SDW) order when there is no applied magnetic field. Furthermore, we show that PDW phases support topological defects that combine dislocations in the induced CDW/SDW order with a fractional vortex in the usual superconducting order. These defects provide a mechanism for fluctuation-driven non-superconducting CDW/SDW phases and conventional vortices with CDW/SDW order in the core.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge useful discussions with K. Hattori, K. Ueda and K. Yang. D.F.A. and H.T. acknowledge hospitality from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics while part of this work was done. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY05-51164. H.T. was partly supported by Scientific Research on Priority Areas Grants-in-Aid (Nos 19052003 and 17071011) from the MEXT of Japan.
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Agterberg, D., Tsunetsugu, H. Dislocations and vortices in pair-density-wave superconductors. Nature Phys 4, 639–642 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys999
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys999
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