Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 32, Pages 11663-11667Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409444111
Keywords
heavy fermion materials; unconventional superconductivity; f-electron-mediated pairing mechanism
Categories
Funding
- US Department of Energy [DEAC02-98CH10886, DE-FG02-05ER46225]
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-FG02-05ER46225] Funding Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
- EPSRC [EP/I031014/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/I031014/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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To identify the microscopic mechanism of heavy-fermion Cooper pairing is an unresolved challenge in quantum matter studies; it may also relate closely to finding the pairing mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity. Magnetically mediated Cooper pairing has long been the conjectured basis of heavy-fermion superconductivity but no direct verification of this hypothesis was achievable. Here, we use a novel approach based on precision measurements of the heavy-fermion band structure using quasiparticle interference imaging to reveal quantitatively the momentum space (k-space) structure of the f-electron magnetic interactions of CeCoIn5. Then, by solving the superconducting gap equations on the two heavy-fermion bands E-k(alpha,beta) with these magnetic interactions as mediators of the Cooper pairing, we derive a series of quantitative predictions about the superconductive state. The agreement found between these diverse predictions and the measured characteristics of superconducting CeCoIn5 then provides direct evidence that the heavy-fermion Cooper pairing is indeed mediated by f-electron magnetism.
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