2013/06/30 by Rafael M. Fernandes, Andrew J. Millis · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Corporate Taxation and Avoidance #Iron-based superconductors research #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.111.127001
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 127001 (2013) · revised version; supplementary material included
openalex publication_date 2013/09/16 · arxiv created 2013/09/20 · arxiv updated 2013/09/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In several families of iron-based superconducting materials, a d-wave pairing instability may compete with the leading s-wave instability. Here, we show that when both states have comparable free energies, superconducting and nematic degrees of freedom are strongly coupled. Whereas nematic order causes a sharp nonanalytic increase in T(c), nematic fluctuations can change the character of the s-wave to d-wave transition, favoring an intermediate state that does not break time-reversal symmetry but does break tetragonal symmetry. The coupling between superconductivity and nematicity is also manifested in the strong softening of the shear modulus across the superconducting transition. Our results show that nematicity can be used as a diagnostic tool to search for unconventional pairing states in iron pnictides and chalcogenides.