Understanding Superconductivity With Graphene
ECE/COS Associate Professor Kin Chung Fong published research on “Superfluid Stiffness of Twisted Trilayer Graphene Superconductors” in Nature. Written in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and MIT, Fong uses ideas from resonant circuits to measure superfluid stiffness, providing deep insights into the nature of unconventional high-temperature superconductivity.
Abstract:
The robustness of the macroscopic quantum nature of a superconductor can be characterized by the superfluid stiffness, ρs, a quantity that describes the energy required to vary the phase of the macroscopic quantum wavefunction. In unconventional superconductors, such as cuprates, the low-temperature behaviour of ρs markedly differs from that of conventional superconductors owing to quasiparticle excitations from gapless points (nodes) in momentum space. Intensive research on the recently discovered magic-angle twisted graphene family has revealed, in addition to superconducting states, strongly correlated electronic states associated with spontaneously broken symmetries, inviting the study of ρs to uncover the potentially unconventional nature of its superconductivity. Here we report the measurement of ρs in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (TTG), revealing unconventional nodal-gap superconductivity. Utilizing radio-frequency reflectometry techniques to measure the kinetic inductive response of superconducting TTG coupled to a microwave resonator, we find a linear temperature dependence of ρs at low temperatures and nonlinear Meissner effects in the current-bias dependence, both indicating nodal structures in the superconducting order parameter. Furthermore, the doping dependence shows a linear correlation between the zero-temperature ρs and the superconducting transition temperature Tc, reminiscent of Uemura’s relation in cuprates, suggesting phase-coherence-limited superconductivity. Our results provide strong evidence for nodal superconductivity in TTG and put strong constraints on the mechanisms of these graphene-based superconductors.