/ News, Research, Studies, Info / R. Pawlak
New article in Nature!
Superconductivity and magnetic fields are know to be largely incompatible, and the critical magnetic field is an important measure of the strength of the superconductor. Crystalline rhombohedral multilayer graphene (RHG) is a promising platform to explore new quantum states of matter due to its superior material quality and gate-tunable strong correlation effects. In this work in collaboration with Long Ju's group at MIT, we present a family of three surprising states of superconductivity in 4- or 5-layer rhombohedral graphene, all of which are are able to persist in the presence of strong in-plane magnetic fields up to ~9 T, exceeding the Pauli limit by far more than a factor of 10. In a further surprise, one state is even enhanced by a perpendicular magnetic field. This is in contract to bernal graphene, which showed only relatively weak in-plane enhancement. The two other states are boosted by the in-plane field, and one of them is only created above ~5 Tesla in-plane field. None of these states could be suppressed with the 9 T magnet of this experiment. This establishes a new family of unconventional, magnetic field-boosted superconductors in rhombohedral graphene. These states reside at relatively low gate electric fields owing to the intrinsically flatter band dispersion — facilitating their study and further engineering. This is paving the way for realizing non-Abelian quasiparticles and topological superconductivity in the extreme clean limit of crystalline graphene.
See also:
News Uni Basel Graphene reveals surprising types of superconducting states
MIT News Graphene can hold multiple states of superconductivity, a new study finds