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Self-consistent surface superconductivity in time-reversal symmetric Weyl semimetals

Mattia Trama1,*, Viktor Könye1,2, Ion Cosma Fulga1, and Jeroen van den Brink1

  • *Contact author: mtrama@unisa.it
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Phys. Rev. B 112, 064514 – Published 18 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bdtb-mb8c

Abstract

Weyl semimetals host topologically protected surface states, the so-called Fermi arcs, that have a penetration depth into the bulk that depends on surface-momentum, and diverges at the Weyl points. It has recently been observed in PtBi2 that such Fermi arc states can become superconducting, with a critical temperature larger than that of the bulk. Here we introduce a general variational method that captures the interplay between surface and bulk superconductivity for any bulk Hamiltonian that harbors (topological) surface states with varying penetration depth. From the self-consistent solutions, we establish that the surface state localization length of Weyl semimetals leads to characteristic features in the surface superconductivity, with a gap depending on surface momentum and a penetration length for the order parameter that is temperature-dependent due to competition with the bulk superconductivity.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. B 112, 064514– Published 18 August, 2025
  • Received 7 October 2024
  • Revised 2 April 2025
  • Accepted 5 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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