Upper Critical Field and Pairing Symmetry of Ising Superconductors

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that the measured critical field Hc2 in various transition metal dichalcogenide superconductors is poorly understood, we reexamine its scaling behavior with temperature and spin-orbit coupling (SOC). By computing the spin-susceptibility in a multipocket system, we find that segments of the Fermi surface (FS) at which the SOC has nodal points can have a contribution orders of magnitude larger than the remaining FS, hence setting the Hc2, assuming the presence of a conventional singlet superconducting order parameter. Nodal lines of an Ising SOC in the Brillouin zone are imposed by symmetry, so they cause such nodal points whenever they intersect an FS pocket, which is indeed the case in monolayer NbSe2 and TaS2, but not in gated MoS2 and WS2. Our analysis reinterprets existing measurements, concluding that a dominant singlet-order parameter on pockets with SOC nodes is consistent with the Hc2(T) data for all monolayer Ising superconductors, in contrast to previous contradictory pairing assumptions. Finally, we predict a doping-dependent experimental signature of our theory.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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