Interplay of orbital effects and nanoscale strain in topological crystalline insulators

10.1038/s41467-018-03887-5Nature Communications91155

Nonlocal effect and dimensions of Cooper pairs measured by low-energy muons and polarized neutrons in type-I superconductors

status: publishe

Robustness of Rashba and Dirac Fermions against Strong Disorder

By addressing the interplay between substitutional disorder and spin-orbit-coupling in chalcogenide alloys, we predict a strong robustness of spectral features at the Fermi energy. Indeed, supplementing our state of the art first-principles calculations with modeling analysis, we show that the disorder self-energy is vanishingly small close to the band gap, thus i) allowing for bulk Rashba-like spin splitting to be observed in ferroelectric alloys by means of Angle Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, and ii) protecting the band-character inversion related to the topological transition in recently discovered Topological Crystalline Insulators. Such a protection against strong disorder, which we demonstrate to be general for three dimensional Dirac systems, has potential and valuable implications for novel technologies, as spintronics and/or spinorbitronics

Controlling the near-surface superfluid density in underdoped YBa2Cu3O6+x by photo-illumination

The interaction with light weakens the superconducting ground state in classical superconductors. The situation in cuprate superconductors is more complicated: illumination increases the charge carrier density, a photo-induced effect that persists below room temperature. Furthermore, systematic investigations in underdoped YBa2Cu3O6+x (YBCO) have shown an enhanced critical temperature Tc. Until now, studies of photo-persistent conductivity (PPC) have been limited to investigations of structural and transport properties, as well as the onset of superconductivity. Here we show how changes in the magnetic screening profile of YBCO in the Meissner state due to PPC can be determined on a nanometer scale utilizing low-energy muons. The data obtained reveal a strongly increased superfluid density within the first few tens of nanometers from the sample surface. Our findings suggest a non-trivial modification of the near-surface band structure and give direct evidence that the superfluid density of YBCO can be controlled by light illumination