2025/06/25 by Cai, Yuchang, Rui-Xing Zhang, Zhang, Rui-Xing
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Rare-earth and actinide compounds #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.20842
openalex publication_date 2025/06/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Determining the symmetry of Cooper pairs remains a central challenge in the study of unconventional superconductors, particularly for chiral states that spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry. Here we demonstrate that point-like impurities in chiral superconductors generate in-gap bound states with a distinctive asymmetry: the local density of states at the impurity site vanishes at one bound-state energy, but not at its particle-hole conjugate. We prove this behavior analytically in generic two-dimensional, single-band chiral superconductors, showing it arises from a fundamental interplay between pairing chirality and crystalline rotation symmetry. Our numerical simulations confirm that this diagnostic feature persists in multiband systems and for spatially extended impurities. Our results establish a symmetry-enforced real-space diagnostic for chiral superconductivity at the atomic scale.