Spin triplet superconducting state due to broken inversion symmetry in Li2Pt3B

We report B-11 and Pt-195 NMR measurements in noncentrosymmetric superconductor Li2Pt3B. We find that the spin susceptibility measured by the Knight shift remains unchanged across the superconducting transition temperature T-c. With decreasing temperature (T) below T-c, the spin-lattice relaxation rate 1/T-1 decreases with no coherence peak and is in proportion to T-3. These results indicate that the Cooper pair is in the spin-triplet state and that there exist line nodes in the superconducting gap function. They are in sharp contrast to those in the isostructural Li2Pd3B which is a spin-singlet, s-wave superconductor, and are ascribed to the enhanced spin-orbit coupling due to the lack of spatial inversion symmetry. Our finding points to a new paradigm where exotic superconductivity arises in the absence of electron-electron correlations.