Friedel oscillations and chiral superconductivity in monolayer NbSe$_2$

Abstract

In 1965 Kohn and Luttinger proposed a genuine electronic mechanism for superconductivity. Despite the bare electrostatic interaction between two electrons being repulsive, in a metal electron-hole fluctuations can give rise to Friedel oscillations of the screened Coulomb potential. Cooper pairing among the electrons then emerges when taking advantage of the attractive regions. The nature of the leading pairing mechanism in some two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides is still debated. Focusing on NbSe$_2$, we show that superconductivity can be induced by the Coulomb interaction when accounting for screening effects on the trigonal lattice with multiple orbitals. Using ab initio-based tight-binding parametrizations for the relevant low-energy d-bands, we evaluate the screened interaction microscopically, in a scheme including Bloch overlaps. In the direct space, we find long-range Friedel oscillations alternating in sign, a key to the Kohn-Luttinger mechanism. The momentum-resolved gap equations predict two degenerate solutions at the critical temperature Tc, signaling the unconventional nature of the pairing. Their complex linear combination, i.e., a chiral gap with p-like symmetry, provides the ground state of the system. Our prediction of a fully gapped chiral phase well below Tc is in excellent agreement with the spectral function extracted from tunneling spectroscopy measurements of single-layer NbSe$_2$.