Discovery of orbital-selective Cooper pairing in FeSe
Abstract
The superconductor iron selenide (FeSe) is of intense interest owing to its unusual nonmagnetic nematic state and potential for high-temperature superconductivity. But its Cooper pairing mechanism has not been determined. We used Bogoliubov quasiparticle interference imaging to determine the Fermi surface geometry of the electronic bands surrounding the Γ = (0, 0) and X = (π/aFe, 0) points of FeSe and to measure the corresponding superconducting energy gaps. We show that both gaps are extremely anisotropic but nodeless and that they exhibit gap maxima oriented orthogonally in momentum space. Moreover, by implementing a novel technique, we demonstrate that these gaps have opposite sign with respect to each other. This complex gap configuration reveals the existence of orbital-selective Cooper pairing that, in FeSe, is based preferentially on electrons from the dyz orbitals of the iron atoms.
Citation
Sprau , P O , Kostin , A , Kreisel , A , Böhmer , A E , Taufour , V , Canfield , P C , Mukherjee , S , Hirschfeld , P J , Andersen , B M & Davis , J C S 2017 , ' Discovery of orbital-selective Cooper pairing in FeSe ' , Science , vol. 357 , no. 6346 , pp. 75-80 . https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal1575
Publication
Science
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0036-8075Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2017, the Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal1575
Description
For movie S1, see http://www.physik.uni-leipzig.de/~kreisel/oscp/S1.mp4, for movie S2, see http://www.physik.uni-leipzig.de/~kreisel/oscp/S2.mp4 and for movie S3, see http://www.physik.uni-leipzig.de/~kreisel/oscp/S3.mp4 Funding: Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative through Grant GBMF4544 (JCSD)Collections
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