Superconductivity of doped Weyl semimetals: Finite-momentum pairing and electronic analog of the 3He-A phase

Gil Young Cho; Jens H. Bardarson; Yuan-Ming Lu; Joel E. Moore

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.86.214514

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Superconductivity of doped Weyl semimetals: Finite-momentum pairing and electronic analog of the 3He-A phase

Gil Young Cho, Jens H. Bardarson, Yuan-Ming Lu, Joel E. Moore

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.86.214514 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

We study superconducting states of doped inversion-symmetric Weyl semimetals. Specifically, we consider a lattice model realizing a Weyl semimetal with an inversion symmetry and study the superconducting instability in the presence of a short-ranged attractive interaction. With a phonon-mediated attractive interaction, we find two competing states: a fully gapped finite-momentum Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov pairing state and a nodal even-parity pairing state. We show that, in a BCS-type approximation, the finite-momentum pairing state is energetically favored over the usual even-parity paired state and is robust against weak disorder. Although energetically unfavorable, the even-parity pairing state provides an electronic analog of the 3He-A phase in that the nodes of the even-parity state carry nontrivial winding numbers and therefore support a surface flat band. We briefly discuss other possible superconducting states that may be realized in Weyl semimetals.