Stabilizing fluctuating spin-triplet superconductivity in graphene via induced spin-orbit coupling

A recent experiment showed that proximity induced Ising spin-orbit coupling enhances the spin-triplet superconductivity in Bernal bilayer graphene. Here, we show that, due to the nearly perfect spin rotation symmetry of graphene, the fluctuations of the spin orientation of the triplet order parameter suppress the superconducting transition to nearly zero temperature. Our analysis shows that both Ising spin-orbit coupling and in-plane magnetic field can eliminate these low-lying fluctuations and can greatly enhance the transition temperature, consistent with the recent experiment. Our model also suggests the possible existence of a phase at small anisotropy and magnetic field which exhibits quasi-long-range ordered spin-singlet charge 4e superconductivity, even while the triplet 2e superconducting order only exhibits short-ranged correlations. Finally, we discuss relevant experimental signatures.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures + 8 pages, 1 figure supplementa

Cavity magnon-polaritons in cuprate parent compounds

Cavity control of quantum matter may offer new ways to study and manipulate many-body systems. A particularly appealing idea is to use cavities to enhance superconductivity, especially in unconventional or high-$T_c$ systems. Motivated by this, we propose a scheme for coupling Terahertz resonators to the antiferromagnetic fluctuations in a cuprate parent compound, which are believed to provide the glue for Cooper pairs in the superconducting phase. First, we derive the interaction between magnon excitations of the Ne\'el-order and polar phonons associated with the planar oxygens. This mode also couples to the cavity electric field, and in the presence of spin-orbit interactions mediates a linear coupling between the cavity and magnons, forming hybridized magnon-polaritons. This hybridization vanishes linearly with photon momentum, implying the need for near-field optical methods, which we analyze within a simple model. We then derive a higher-order coupling between the cavity and magnons which is only present in bilayer systems, but does not rely on spin-orbit coupling. This interaction is found to be large, but only couples to the bimagnon operator. As a result we find a strong, but heavily damped, bimagnon-cavity interaction which produces highly asymmetric cavity line-shapes in the strong-coupling regime. To conclude, we outline several interesting extensions of our theory, including applications to carrier-doped cuprates and other strongly-correlated systems with Terahertz-scale magnetic excitations.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figure

Evaluating range-expansion models for calculating nonnative species' expansion rate

Species range shifts associated with environmental change or biological invasions are increasingly important study areas. However, quantifying range expansion rates may be heavily influenced by methodology and/or sampling bias. We compared expansion rate estimates of Roesel's bush-cricket (Metrioptera roeselii, Hagenbach 1822), a nonnative species currently expanding its range in south-central Sweden, from range statistic models based on distance measures (mean, median, 95th gamma quantile, marginal mean, maximum, and conditional maximum) and an area-based method (grid occupancy). We used sampling simulations to determine the sensitivity of the different methods to incomplete sampling across the species' range. For periods when we had comprehensive survey data, range expansion estimates clustered into two groups: (1) those calculated from range margin statistics (gamma, marginal mean, maximum, and conditional maximum: similar to 3 km/year), and (2) those calculated from the central tendency (mean and median) and the area-based method of grid occupancy (similar to 1.5 km/year). Range statistic measures differed greatly in their sensitivity to sampling effort; the proportion of sampling required to achieve an estimate within 10% of the true value ranged from 0.17 to 0.9. Grid occupancy and median were most sensitive to sampling effort, and the maximum and gamma quantile the least. If periods with incomplete sampling were included in the range expansion calculations, this generally lowered the estimates (range 16-72%), with exception of the gamma quantile that was slightly higher (6%). Care should be taken when interpreting rate expansion estimates from data sampled from only a fraction of the full distribution. Methods based on the central tendency will give rates approximately half that of methods based on the range margin. The gamma quantile method appears to be the most robust to incomplete sampling bias and should be considered as the method of choice when sampling the entire distribution is not possible