Field-Induced $p$-Wave Superconducting State of Mesoscopic Systems

Field-Induced $p$ -Wave Superconducting State of Mesoscopic Systems

Jia-Wei Huo, Wei-Qiang Chen, S. Raghu, and Fu-Chun Zhang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 257002 – Published 18 June 2012

Abstract

By using Bogoliubov–de Gennes equations, we study superconducting (SC) states in a quasi-two-dimensional system of radius $R$ . It is shown that no vortices exist in $s$ -wave SC samples with $R < R_{c} \sim ξ (0)$ , the $T = 0$ coherence length. We predict that chiral $p$ -wave states exhibit superconductivity for $R < R_{c}$ only in the presence of a vortex with opposite chirality. This induced SC phase is a consequence of nonzero chirality of the pairing order parameter and implies the presence of chiral edge currents. Our study may be applied to sharply probing the pairing symmetry of unconventional superconductors.

Received 24 August 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.257002

Authors & Affiliations

Jia-Wei Huo¹, Wei-Qiang Chen^2,1, S. Raghu³, and Fu-Chun Zhang^1,4,*

¹Department of Physics and Center of Theoretical and Computational Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
²Department of Physics, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
³Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
⁴Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

^*fuchun@hku.hk

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Vol. 108, Iss. 25 — 22 June 2012

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