Family of multilayer graphene superconductors with tunable chirality: Momentum-space vortices nucleated by a ring of Berry curvature

Abstract

Recent experiments in rhombohedrally stacked multilayer graphene heterostructures have reported signatures of chiral superconductivity, emerging from a spin- and valley-polarized normal state with broken time-reversal symmetry and an associated anomalous Hall effect. These findings bring into focus the role of the electronic Bloch wave function and the quantum geometric tensor in determining the superconducting pairing channel. In this work, we examine superconducting instabilities of a model of N-layer rhombohedral graphene that possesses an enhanced Berry curvature distribution on an extended ring in momentum space, that we dub the ‘‘Berry ring of fire,’’ in the presence of an isotropic attractive interaction with a parametrically controlled spatial range. We determine that local interactions favor a N-fold winding in the order parameter phase for odd-N layered systems, with even-N layers requiring a spatially extended attraction range to achieve pairing. For generic interaction lengths, we discover a family of chiral superconductors and, remarkably, momentum-space vortices nucleated on the Berry ring of fire. The existence of these vortices can be traced to a momentum-space flux quantization condition involving the Berry curvature, with the phase winding dictated by a combination of the Berry flux and a ‘‘statistical flux’’ to enforce Fermi-Dirac statistics. Such an order-parameter structure allows for the possibility of in situ tuning between various chiral superconducting phases through changes in the electron density or the displacement field. We discuss ways in which these predictions can be experimentally tested and potentially exploited in future devices.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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