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arXiv · 1404.4637

Suppression of spontaneous currents in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ by surface disorder

Samuel Lederer·Wen Huang·Edward Taylor·Srinivas Raghu·Catherine Kallin
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Abstract

A major challenge to the chiral $p$-wave hypothesis for the pairing symmetry of the unconventional superconductor Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ is the null result of sensitive scanning magnetometry experiments designed to detect the expected spontaneous charge currents. Motivated by junction tunneling conductance measurements which indicate the quenching of superconductivity at the surfaces of even high-purity samples, we examine the spontaneous currents in a chiral $p$-wave superconductor near a normal metal / superconductor interface using the lattice Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations and Ginzburg-Landau theory, and find that the edge current is suppressed by more than an order of magnitude compared to previous estimates. These calculations demonstrate that interface details can have a quantitatively meaningful effect on the expectations for magnetometry experiments.

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Samuel Lederer, Wen Huang, Edward Taylor, Srinivas Raghu, Catherine Kallin. 2014-04-17. Suppression of spontaneous currents in Sr$_2$RuO$_4$ by surface disorder. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.90.134521

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