Thursday, July 23, 2015

Triplet superconductivity in a quasi-one-dimensional metal

Last week I was at Stanford and my collaborators and I finished a paper
Spin triplet superconductivity in a weak-coupling Hubbard model for the quasi-one-dimensional compound Li0.9Mo6O17
Weejee Cho, Christian Platt, Ross H. McKenzie, and Srinivas Raghu
The purple bronze Li_0.9Mo_6O_17 is of interest due to its quasi-one-dimensional electronic structure and the possible Luttinger liquid behavior resulting from it. For sufficiently low temperatures, it is a superconductor with a pairing symmetry that is still to be determined.  To shed light on this issue, we analyze a minimal Hubbard model for this material involving four Molybdenum orbitals per unit cell near quarter filling, using asymptotically exact perturbative renormalization group methods. We find that spin triplet odd-parity superconductivity is the dominant instability. Approximate nesting properties of the two quasi-one-dimensional Fermi surfaces enhance certain second-order processes, which play crucial roles in determining the structure of the pairing gap.  Notably, we find that the gap has “accidental nodes”, i.e. it has more sign changes than required by the point-group symmetry.
Earlier relevant posts are:
Weak coupling can give important insights which describes the renormalisation group method used in the paper and results obtained using it.
Desperately seeking triplet superconductors

We welcome comments.
Hopefully the paper will stimulate experiments to definitively determine the nature of the superconducting pairing.

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