Department of Physics and Materials Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
Nat Commun. 2013;4:2596. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3596.
Superconductors with a chiral p-wave pairing are of great interest because they could support Majorana modes that could enable the development of topological quantum computing technologies that are robust against decoherence. Sr₂RuO₄ is widely believed to be a chiral p-wave superconductor. Yet, the mechanism by which superconductivity emerges in this, and indeed most other unconventional superconductors, remains unclear. Here we show that the local superconducting transition temperature in the vicinity of lattice dislocations in Sr₂RuO₄ can be up to twice that of its bulk. This is all the more surprising for the fact that disorder is known to easily quench superconductivity in this material. With the help of a phenomenological theory that takes into account the crystalline symmetry near a dislocation and the pairing symmetry of Sr₂RuO₄, we predict that a similar enhancement should emerge as a consequence of symmetry reduction in any superconductor with a two-component order parameter.
手性 p 波配对的超导体引起了极大的关注，因为它们可以支持马约拉纳模式，从而能够开发出对退相干具有鲁棒性的拓扑量子计算技术。Sr₂RuO₄ 被广泛认为是一种手性 p 波超导体。然而，在这种超导体，甚至在大多数其他非常规超导体中，超导出现的机制仍不清楚。在这里，我们表明 Sr₂RuO₄ 中晶格位错附近的局部超导转变温度可以高达其体相的两倍。考虑到在这种材料中，无序很容易猝灭超导性，这一事实更加令人惊讶。借助一个考虑到位错附近的晶体对称性和 Sr₂RuO₄ 的配对对称性的唯象理论，我们预测任何具有两分量序参量的超导体都会由于对称减少而出现类似的增强。
