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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Superconducting orbital magnetoelectric effect and its evolution across the superconductor-normal metal phase transition

Wen-Yu He1,* and K. T. Law2,†

  • 1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, China

  • *wenyuhe@mit.edu
  • †phlaw@ust.hk
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Phys. Rev. Research 3, L032012 – Published 8 July, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L032012

Abstract

The superconducting magnetoelectric effect, which is the current-induced magnetization in a superconductor, mainly focused on spin magnetization in previous studies, but ignored the effect of the orbital magnetic moments carried by the paired Bloch electrons. In this work, we show that orbital magnetic moments in superconductors can induce large orbital magnetization in the presence of a current. We constructed a unified description for the current-induced spin and orbital magnetization across the superconductor-normal metal phase transition. We find that in a superconductor with uniform pairing, the current-induced magnetization at a given current density is the same as that in its normal metal state, while with the nonuniform superconducting pairing, the current-induced magnetization exhibits an abrupt change in magnitude near the superconductor-normal metal phase transition. Importantly, our theory predicts the orbital magnetoelectric effect in superconducting twisted bilayer graphene which has paired Bloch electrons with large orbital magnetic moments and negligible spin-orbit coupling. We propose that the measurement of the current-induced orbital magnetoelectric effect can be used to detect the possible nonuniform pairings in twisted bilayer graphene and other newly discovered superconductors with nontrivial Berry curvatures.

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Phys. Rev. Research 3, L032012– Published 8 July, 2021
  • Received 23 December 2020
  • Revised 11 June 2021
  • Accepted 15 June 2021
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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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