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Disorder stabilized breached-pair phase in an s-wave superconductor

Madhuparna Karmakar1,2,*, Subhojit Roy1,†, Shantanu Mukherjee1,‡, and Rajesh Narayanan1,§

  • 1Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India
  • 2Centre for Quantum Science and Technology, Chennai Institute of Technology, Chennai - 600037, India

  • *madhuparna.k@gmail.com
  • †sjr@physics.iitm.ac.in
  • ‡shantanu@iitm.ac.in
  • §rnarayanan@iitm.ac.in
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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043159 – Published 5 December, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.043159

Abstract

The breached-pair state wherein superconductivity coexists with magnetic polarization is known to exist as a ground state of an imbalanced Fermi system only under very fine-tuned conditions. Here, we show that an s-wave superconductor that is well described by a spin-selectively disordered attractive Hubbard model away from half filling has the breached-pair state as a ground-state without the need for such fine-tuning. The existence of this breached-pair phase is established by laying recourse to a Monte Carlo technique called static path approximation (SPA). Further, by using the SPA, we map out the entire phase diagram of the spin-selectively disordered attractive Hubbard model and show that apart from the breached-pair phase, the many-body system hosts the putative s-wave superconducting state and a polarized Fermi-liquid state.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, 043159– Published 5 December, 2022
  • Received 21 March 2022
  • Revised 4 August 2022
  • Accepted 26 September 2022
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