2025/09/03 by Rasmussen, Christian L. H., Gondolf, Jannik, Barkman, Mats +4 · 3 citations
#FOS: Physical sciences #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.03247
Altermagnetic metals break time-reversal symmetry and feature spin-split Fermi surfaces generated by compensated Néel-ordered collinear magnetic moments. Being metallic, such altermagnets may undergo a further instability at low temperatures to a superconducting state, and it is an interesting open question what are the salient features of such altermagnetic superconductors? We address this question on the basis of realistic microscopic models that capture the altermagnetic sublattice degrees of freedom. We find that the sublattice structure can strongly affect the superconducting gap structure in altermagnetic superconductors. In particular, it imposes nodes in the gap on the Brillouin zone edges for superconductors stabilized by momentum-independent bare attraction channels. We contrast this to the case of superconductivity generated by extended range interactions where pairing is allowed on the Brillouin zone edges and both spin-singlet and equal-spin-pairing triplet states can be stabilized. Equal-spin-pairing triplet superconductivity is generically favored in the limit of large altermagnetic spin-splitting of the bands compared to the superconducting gap scale, and features characteristic non-unitary properties due to the altermagnetic order.