Magnetic-field-sensitive charge density waves in the superconductor UTe2

Anuva Aishwarya, Julian May-Mann, Arjun Raghavan, Laimei Nie, Marisa Romanelli, Sheng Ran, Shanta R. Saha, Johnpierre Paglione, Nicholas P. Butch, Eduardo Fradkin and Vidya Madhavan ()
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Anuva Aishwarya: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Julian May-Mann: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Arjun Raghavan: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Laimei Nie: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Marisa Romanelli: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sheng Ran: University of Maryland
Shanta R. Saha: University of Maryland
Johnpierre Paglione: University of Maryland
Nicholas P. Butch: University of Maryland
Eduardo Fradkin: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Vidya Madhavan: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nature, 2023, vol. 618, issue 7967, 928-933

Abstract: Abstract The intense interest in triplet superconductivity partly stems from theoretical predictions of exotic excitations such as non-Abelian Majorana modes, chiral supercurrents and half-quantum vortices1–4. However, fundamentally new and unexpected states may emerge when triplet superconductivity appears in a strongly correlated system. Here we use scanning tunnelling microscopy to reveal an unusual charge-density-wave (CDW) order in the heavy-fermion triplet superconductor UTe2 (refs. 5–8). Our high-resolution maps reveal a multi-component incommensurate CDW whose intensity gets weaker with increasing field, with the CDW eventually disappearing at the superconducting critical field Hc2. To understand the phenomenology of this unusual CDW, we construct a Ginzburg–Landau theory for a uniform triplet superconductor coexisting with three triplet pair-density-wave states. This theory gives rise to daughter CDWs that would be sensitive to magnetic field owing to their origin in a pair-density-wave state and provides a possible explanation for our data. Our discovery of a CDW state that is sensitive to magnetic fields and strongly intertwined with superconductivity provides important information for understanding the order parameters of UTe2.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06005-8

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