Magnon-Mediated Pairing and Isotope Effect in Iron-based Superconductors

TL;DR

This paper presents a magnon-mediated pairing mechanism in iron-based superconductors, explaining the isotope effect and coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity through a multi-band model with dominant inter-band scattering.

Contribution

It introduces a magnon-based interaction model for multi-band superconductivity that accounts for the isotope effect without phonons and explains coexistence with magnetic order.

Findings

Magnon-mediated interactions dominate at long wavelengths.

The isotope effect arises from lattice constant changes, not phonons.

The model explains coexistence of superconductivity and magnetic order.

Abstract

Within a minimal model for the iron-based superconductors in which itinerant electrons interact with a band of local moments, we derive a a general conclusion for multi-band superconductivity. In a multi-band superconductor, due to the Adler theorem, the inter-band scattering dominates the intra-band scattering at the long wave length limit as long as both interactions are induced by Goldstone boson (which is magnon in our case) and the transfered momentum is nonzero. Such kind of interaction leads to a well-known sigh-reversing superconductivity even if the inter-band and intra-band interaction are repulsive. This effect can be modeled as arising from an internal Josephson link between the Fermi surface sheets. Our model is also consistent with the recently discovered coexistence of superconductivity and magnetic order in iron-pnictides. Although the experimentally observed isotope effect is large, $\alpha=0.4$, we show that it is consistent with a non-phononic mechanism in which it is the isotope effects result in a change in the lattice constant and as a consequence the zero-point motion of the Fe atoms.