2015/03/17 by Aperis, Alex, Maldonado, Pablo, Oppeneer, Peter M.
#FOS: Physical sciences #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1503.05155
In all known superconductors the pairing of fermions is not sensitive to the sign of their time-argument difference, leading to a Cooper pair wavefunction that is even in time/frequency. Four decades ago it was suggested that odd-frequency superconductivity should in principle be realizable. However, observation of odd-frequency superconductivity in bulk materials has remained elusive. Solving the field-dependent anisotropic Eliashberg equations, we present ab initio evidence for the emergence of odd-frequency pairing under an applied magnetic field in the archetypal superconductor MgB2. We provide the full momentum, frequency and spin resolved dependence and magnetic field-temperature phase diagrams of the even and odd-frequency superconducting pair amplitudes and predict fingerprints of the odd-frequency state in tunnelling experiments.