2024/09/20 by Max Geier, Margarita Davydova, Geier, Max +2 · 11 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fullerene Chemistry and Applications #Graphene research and applications #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) #Surface Chemistry and Catalysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.13829
openalex publication_date 2024/09/20 · openalex created_date 2024/10/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A microscopic mechanism for chiral p-wave superconductivity from Coulomb repulsion is proposed for spin- and valley-polarized state of rhombohedral multilayer graphene. The superconducting instability arises when strong Thomas-Fermi screening of the Coulomb potential allows Friedel oscillations to take over - leading to an effective attraction on length scales below the Fermi wavelength. The superconducting critical temperature is largest at low density below a Lifshitz transition to an annular Fermi sea, where the additional pocket strongly enhances Thomas-Fermi screening. The Lifshitz transition also marks a topological phase transition from a trivial to a topological superconducting phase hosting Majorana fermions. The chirality of the superconducting order parameter is selected by the chirality of the valley-polarized Bloch electrons. Our results are in reasonable agreement with observations in a recent experiment on tetralayer graphene [Han, T., Lu, Z., Hadjri, Z. et al., Nature (2025)].