2023/12/28 by Eylon Persky, Alan Fang, Persky, Eylon +15
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Rare-earth and actinide compounds #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.17213
openalex publication_date 2023/12/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 3 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.