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Shunsuke Sasaki

Publications and source records attributed to Shunsuke Sasaki.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

Multigap superconductivity in Ising superconductors: The case of (LaSe)1.14(NbSe2)m misfit layer compounds

Strong spin-orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry in transition metal dichalcogenides give rise to Ising superconductivity, a spin-protected pairing state first identified in monolayer NbSe$_2$ through in-plane critical fields far exceeding the Pauli limit. More recently, Ising superconductivity has been proposed as a potential route to unconventional and even topological superconductivity in bulk misfit compounds. Here, we investigate the superconducting order parameter of layered misfit compounds composed of alternating transition metal dichalcogenide and rocksalt layers, which host extremely doped, electronically decoupled NbSe$_2$ sheets within a three-dimensional crystal. Using directional scanning tunneling spectroscopy on the misfit superconductors (LaSe)$_{1.14}$(NbSe$_2$) and (LaSe)$_{1.14}$(NbSe$_2$)$_2$, we uncover a strongly anisotropic multigap superconducting state: a fragile gap on the $Γ$-centered Fermi-surface pocket coexists with a robust, intrinsic gap on the K and K$'$ pockets. These features are in quantitative agreement with momentum-resolved gaps $Δ(\mathbf{k})$ obtained from anisotropic Migdal-Eliashberg calculations. The marked fragility of the $Γ$-centered gap, combined with the strong sensitivity of the critical temperature to non-magnetic disorder, points to pairing beyond conventional $s$-wave symmetry, potentially involving a topological order parameter. These results establish NbSe$_2$-based misfit compounds as a tunable bulk platform for multigap, unconventional superconductivity, with Ising protection offering a promising route toward topological pairing.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Doping-controlled topological superconducting transition in misfit layer compounds

Achieving topological superconductivity is a key goal in quantum physics, offering a path to fault-tolerant quantum computers. A central challenge in this field is to continuously drive a material through a topological quantum phase transition to directly observe the evolution from trivial to topological superconductivity. However, finding a robust platform that allows such extreme and precise tuning remains a challenge. Here, we demonstrate a doping-controlled phase transition from a conventional to a topological superconducting state in the bulk misfit layer compound (LaxPb1-xSe)1.14(NbSe2)2. We reveal a non-monotonic phase diagram characterized by two distinct superconducting regimes separated by a non-superconducting phase at a precise doping. In the highly doped regime, the superconducting phase becomes remarkably sensitive to non-magnetic disorder, and orientation-selective in-gap modes emerge at atomic step edges. Supported by Bogoliubov-de Gennes calculations, these emergent spatial signatures are consistent with a time-reversal-symmetric crystalline-topological order parameter. Our results establish misfit compounds as a platform to engineering topological superconductivity.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Doping tunable charge density waves in misfit layer compounds

The ability to tune charge density waves (CDWs) through external control knobs, such as doping, pressure or strain is crucial for exploring the phase diagram of two dimensional (2D) or quasi-2D materials. Yet, controlling CDWs critical temperature and ordering vector remains a challenge for current experimental techniques. In this work, we establish misfit layer compound heterostructures as a reliable platform to manipulate CDWs in transition metal dichalcogenides. By combining ab initio calculations with low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, we show how to achieve doping tunable control over NbSe2 CDW by chemically alloying in the rocksalt subunit. Crucially, we prove that tuning the La Pb ratio in the misfit family (LaxPb1xSe)1.14(NbSe2)2 enables stabilization of different CDW orders, such as 2x2 or 3x3 patterns, and even coexisting phases. This work paves the way for engineering transition metal dichalcogenides with tailored charge density waves within misfit heterostructures.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Tuning the Charge Transfer of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides via Misfit Layer Compounds

Misfit layer compounds (MLCs) are a versatile platform for exploring the electronic phase diagram of two dimensional (2D) materials beyond the limits of conventional gating techniques. This work demonstrates the precise tunability of electron doping in NbSe2 monolayers through chemical alloying within the rocksalt layer of (LaxPb1xSe)1.14(NbSe2)2 heterostructures. By combining first principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations with angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), we prove that the rocksalt unit acts as an universal electron donor. We show that varying the La Pb ratio results in a rigid Fermi level shift, still preserving the NbSe2 electronic structure. Crucially, photon energy dependent ARPES confirms that the NbSe2 layers nearly maintain their intrinsic 2D character and orbital identity within the three dimensional misfit. This study establishes MLCs as a reliable platform for engineering emergent states in 2D transition metal dichalcogenides through precise stoichiometric control.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

A Japanese Language Model and Three New Evaluation Benchmarks for Pharmaceutical NLP

We present a Japanese domain-specific language model for the pharmaceutical field, developed through continual pretraining on 2 billion Japanese pharmaceutical tokens and 8 billion English biomedical tokens. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce three new benchmarks: YakugakuQA, based on national pharmacist licensing exams; NayoseQA, which tests cross-lingual synonym and terminology normalization; and SogoCheck, a novel task designed to assess consistency reasoning between paired statements. We evaluate our model against both open-source medical LLMs and commercial models, including GPT-4o. Results show that our domain-specific model outperforms existing open models and achieves competitive performance with commercial ones, particularly on terminology-heavy and knowledge-based tasks. Interestingly, even GPT-4o performs poorly on SogoCheck, suggesting that cross-sentence consistency reasoning remains an open challenge. Our benchmark suite offers a broader diagnostic lens for pharmaceutical NLP, covering factual recall, lexical variation, and logical consistency. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building practical, secure, and cost-effective language models for Japanese domain-specific applications, and provides reusable evaluation resources for future research in pharmaceutical and healthcare NLP. Our model, codes, and datasets are released at https://github.com/EQUES-Inc/pharma-LLM-eval.

cs.CL↗

Ising superconductivity in noncentrosymmetric bulk NbSe2

Ising superconductivity allows in-plane upper critical magnetic fields to vastly surpass Pauli limit by locking the antiparallel electron spins of Cooper pairs in the out-of-plane direction. It was first explicitly demonstrated in fully two-dimensional monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides with large spin-orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry. Since then, several studies have shown that it can be present in layered bulk materials, too. In our previous study, we have clarified the underlying microscopic mechanism of Ising superconductivity in bulk, based on a reduced electronic coupling between superconducting layers due to intercalation by insulating layers and restricted inversion symmetry. But earlier studies suggest that in some transition metal dichalcogenide polytypes Pauli paramagnetic limit is violated even without intercalation. Here, using heat capacity measurements we unambiguously demonstrate, that the pristine noncentrosymmetric bulk 4Ha-NbSe2 polytype significantly violates the Pauli limit. The band structure parameters obtained from ab initio calculations using the experimentally determined crystal structure are used in the theoretical model which provides the microscopic mechanism of the Ising protection based solely on broken inversion symmetry.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

NbSe$_{2}$'s charge density wave collapse in the (LaSe)$_{1.14}$(NbSe$_{2}$)$_{2}$ misfit layer compound

Misfit layer compounds, heterostructures composed by a regular alternating stacking of rocksalt monochalcogenides bilayers and few-layer transition metal dichalchogenides, are an emergent platform to investigate highly doped transition metal dichalcogenides. Among them, (LaSe)$_{1.14}$(NbSe$_2$)$_2$ displays Ising superconductivity, while the presence of a charge density wave (CDW) in the material is still under debate. Here, by using polarized Raman spectroscopy and first-principles calculations, we show that NbSe$_2$ undergoes a doping-driven collapse of the CDW ordering within the misfit, and no signature of the CDW is detected down to 8~K. We provide a complete experimental and theoretical description of the lattice dynamics of this misfit compound. We show that the vibrational properties are obtained from those of the two subunits, namely the LaSe unit and the NbSe$_2$ bilayer, in the presence of a suitable field-effect doping, and then highlight the 2D nature of the lattice dynamics of NbSe$_2$ within the (LaSe)$_{1.14}$(NbSe$_2$)$_2$ 3D structure.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

On the treatment of phenomenological turbulent effects in one dimensional simulations of core-collapse supernovae

We have developed a phenomenological turbulent model with one-dimensional (1D) simulation based on Reynolds decomposition. Using this method, we have systematically studied models with different effects of compression, mixing length parameters, and diffusion coefficient of internal energy, turbulence energy and electron fraction. With employed turbulent effects, supernova explosion can be achieved in 1D geometry, which can mimic the evolution of shock in the 3D simulations. We found that enhancement of turbulent energy by compression affects the early shock evolution. The diffusion coefficients of internal energy and turbulent energy also affect the explodability. The smaller diffusion makes the shock revival faster. Our comparison between the two reveals that the diffusion coefficients of internal energy has a greater impact. These simulations would help understand the role of turbulence in core-collapse supernovae.

astro-ph.HE↗

Protection of Ising spin-orbit coupling in bulk misfit superconductors

Low-dimensional materials have remarkable properties that are distinct from their bulk counterparts. A paradigmatic example is Ising superconductivity that occurs in monolayer materials such as NbSe2 which show a strong violation of the Pauli limit. In monolayers, this occurs due to a combination of broken inversion symmetry and spin-orbit coupling that locks the spins of the electrons out-of-plane. Bulk NbSe2 is centrosymmetric and is therefore not an Ising superconductor. We show that bulk misfit compound superconductors, (LaSe)1.14(NbSe2) and (LaSe)1.14(NbSe2)2, comprised of monolayers and bilayers of NbSe2, exhibit unexpected Ising protection with a Pauli-limit violation comparable to monolayer NbSe2, despite formally having inversion symmetry. We study these misfit compounds using complementary experimental methods in combination with first-principles calculations. We propose theoretical mechanisms of how the Ising protection can survive in bulk materials. We show how some of these mechanisms operate in these bulk compounds due to a concerted effect of charge-transfer, defects, reduction of interlayer hopping, and stacking. This highlights how Ising superconductivity can, unexpectedly, arise in bulk materials, and possibly enable the design of bulk superconductors that are resilient to magnetic fields.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Misfit layer compounds: a platform for heavily-doped two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) display a rich variety of instabilities such as spin and charge orders, Ising superconductivity and topological properties. Their physical properties can be controlled by doping in electric double-layer field-effect transistors (FET). However, for the case of single layer NbSe$_2$, FET doping is limited to $\approx 1\times 10^{14}$ cm$^{-2}$, while a somewhat larger charge injection can be obtained via deposition of K atoms. Here, by performing ARPES, STM, quasiparticle interference measurements, and first principles calculations we show that a misfit compound formed by sandwiching NbSe$_2$ and LaSe layers behaves as a NbSe$_2$ single layer with a rigid doping of $0.55-0.6$ electrons per Nb atom or $\approx 6\times 10^{14}$ cm$^{-2}$. Due to this huge doping, the $3\times3$ charge density wave is replaced by a $2\times2$ order with very short coherence length. As a tremendous number of different misfit compounds can be obtained by sandwiching TMDs layers with rock salt or other layers, our work paves the way to the exploration of heavily doped 2D TMDs over an unprecedented wide range of doping.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Unexplored reactivity of (Sn)2- Oligomers with transition metals in low-temperature solid-state reactions

Chalcogenides (Q = S, Se, Te), one of the most important family of materials in solid-state chemistry, differ from oxides by their ability to form covalently-bonded (Qn)2- oligomers. Each chalcogen atom within such entity fulfills the octet rule by sharing electrons with other chalcogen atoms but some antibonding levels are vacant. This makes these oligomers particularly suited for redox reactions in solid state, namely towards elemental metals with a low redox potential that may be oxidized. We recently used this strategy to design, at low temperature and in an orientated manner, materials with 2D infinite layers through the topochemical insertion of copper into preformed precursors containing (S2)2- and/or (Se2)2- dimers (i.e. La2O2S2, Ba2F2S2 and LaSe2). Herein we extend the validity of the concept to the redox activity of (S2)2- and (S3)2- oligomers towards 3d transition metal elements (Cu, Ni, Fe) and highlight the strong relationship between the structures of the precursors, BaS2 and BaS3, and the products, BaCu2S2, BaCu4S3, BaNiS2 and BaFe2S3. Clearly, beyond the natural interest for the chemical reactivity of oligomers to generate compounds, this soft chemistry route may conduct to the rational conception of materials with a predicted crystal structure.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Virtual turning points and bifurcation of Stokes curves for higher order ordinary differential equations

For a higher order linear ordinary differential operator P, its Stokes curve bifurcates in general when it hits another turning point of P. This phenomenon is most neatly understandable by taking into account Stokes curves emanating from virtual turning points, together with those from ordinary turning points. This understanding of the bifurcation of a Stokes curve plays an important role in resolving a paradox recently found in the Noumi-Yamada system, a system of linear differential equations associated with the fourth Painleve equation.

math-ph↗