Possible unconventional surface superconductivity in the half-Heusler compound YPtBi

Eylon Persky; Alan Fang; Xinyang Zhang; Carolina Adamo; Phillip Wu; Eli Levenson-Falk; Chandra Shekhar; Claudia Felser; Binghai Yan; Aharon Kapitulnik

doi:10.1103/qt3v-yypc

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Possible unconventional surface superconductivity in the half-Heusler compound YPtBi

Eylon Persky ^1,2,3,*, Alan Fang ^1,2, Xinyang Zhang ^1,2,3, Carolina Adamo^1,2,†, Phillip Wu ^1,‡, Eli Levenson-Falk ^1,3,§, Chandra Shekhar ⁴, Claudia Felser ⁴, Binghai Yan ⁵ et al.

Aharon Kapitulnik ^1,2,3,6,∥

¹Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
²Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
³Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
⁴Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, 01187 Dresden, Germany
⁵Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 7610001, Israel
⁶Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

^*Contact author: perskye1@stanford.edu
^†Present address: Northrop Grumman Corporation, Redondo Beach, CA 90278, USA.
^‡Present address: Center of Science Education, National Chung-Hsing University, Department of Chemistry, Taichung City 402, Taiwan ROC.
^§Present address: Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.
^∥Contact author: aharonk@stanford.edu

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Phys. Rev. B 111, 245417 – Published 13 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/qt3v-yypc

Abstract

We report an extensive study of the noncentrosymmetric half-Heusler superconductor YPtBi, revealing an unusual relation between bulk superconductivity and the possible appearance of surface superconductivity on the (111) oriented surface, at temperatures up to three times the bulk transition temperature. Transport measurements confirmed the low carrier density of the material and its bulk superconducting transition, which was also observed in ac susceptibility through mutual inductance (MI) measurements. However, a weak signature of superconductivity in the MI measurements appeared much above the bulk transition temperature, which was further observed in scanning tunneling spectroscopy, pointing to a possible surface superconducting state. Polar Kerr effect measurements suggest that while the bulk superconductor may exhibit an unusual nodal superconducting state, only the surface state breaks time reversal symmetry. Complementary tunneling measurements on LuPtBi are used to establish the observations on YPtBi, while density-functional theory calculations may shed light on the origin of this unusual surface state.

Physical Review B

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Possible unconventional surface superconductivity in the half-Heusler compound YPtBi

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Possible unconventional surface superconductivity in the half-Heusler compound YPtBi

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