2015/10/31 by Benjamin T. Zhou, Noah F. Q. Yuan, Hong-Liang Jiang +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.93.180501
published as Phys. Rev. B 93, 180501 (2016) · 5 pages, 3 figures. Comments are welcome
arxiv created 2016/04/12 · arxiv updated 2016/05/11
In monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), electrons in opposite K valleys are subject to opposite effective Zeeman fields, which are referred to as Ising spin-orbit coupling (SOC) fields. The Ising SOC, originated from in-plane mirror symmetry breaking pins the electron spins in out-of-plane directions, and results in the newly discovered Ising superconducting states with strongly enhanced upper critical fields. In this work, we show that the Ising SOC generates equal-spin triplet Cooper pairs with spin polarization in the in-plane directions. Importantly, the spin-triplet Cooper pairs can induce superconducting pairings in a half-metal wire placed on top of the TMD and result in a topological superconductor with Majorana end states. Direct ways to detect equal-spin triplet Cooper pairs and the differences between Ising superconductors and Rashba superconductors are discussed.