Textured Superconducting State in the Heavy Fermion CeRhIn5

TL;DR

This study presents evidence of textured superconductivity in CeRhIn5 induced by pressure, where coexisting antiferromagnetism leads to anisotropic transport and a difference between resistive and thermodynamic transition temperatures, without changing crystal symmetry.

Contribution

It demonstrates that textured superconductivity can occur without crystal symmetry breaking and may be common in systems with coexisting magnetic and superconducting orders.

Findings

Resistive and thermodynamic superconducting transitions differ in the coexistence phase.

Anisotropic transport indicates textured superconducting planes along {100} planes.

Textured superconductivity may be a general feature in correlated systems with coexisting orders.

Abstract

Anisotropic, spatially textured electronic states often emerge when the symmetry of the underlying crystalline structure is lowered. However, the possibility recently has been raised that novel electronic quantum states with real-space texture could arise in strongly correlated systems even without changing the underlying crystalline structure. Here we report evidence for such texture in the superconducting quantum fluid that is induced by pressure in the heavy-fermion compound CeRhIn5. When long-range antiferromagnetic order coexists with unconventional superconductivity, there is a significant temperature difference between resistively- and thermodynamically-determined transitions into the superconducting state, but this difference disappears in the absence of magnetism. Anisotropic transport behaviour near the superconducting transition in the coexisting phase signals the emergence of textured superconducting planes that are nucleated preferentially along the {100} planes and that appear without a change in crystal symmetry. We show that CeRhIn5 is not unique in exhibiting a difference between resistive and bulk superconducting transition temperatures, indicating that textured superconductivity may be a general consequence of coexisting orders.