Superconductivity-enhanced Nematicity and '$s+d$' Gap Symmetry in Fe(Se$_{1-x}$S$_x$)

TL;DR

This study investigates how sulfur substitution in FeSe influences nematicity and superconductivity, revealing enhanced superconducting transition temperature and complex gap symmetry, with implications for understanding the interplay of structural and electronic properties.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the effects of sulfur doping on nematicity and superconductivity in FeSe, highlighting the role of $s+d$ gap symmetry and disorder effects.

Findings

Superconducting transition temperature T$_c$ increases with S content.

Nematicity is enhanced below T$_c$ despite suppression of structural transition.

Large residual density of states indicates substitution-induced disorder.

Abstract

Superconducting iron chalcogenide FeSe has the simplest crystal structure among all the Fe-based superconductors. Unlike other iron pnictides, FeSe exhibits no long range magnetic order accompanying the tetragonal-to-orthorhombic structural distortion, which raises the fundamental question about the role of magnetism and its associated spin fluctuations in mediating both nematicity and superconductivity. The extreme sensitivity of FeSe to external pressure suggests that chemical pressure, induced by substitution of Se by the smaller ion S, could also a be good tuning parameter to further study the coupling between superconductivity and nematicity and to obtain information on both the Fermi-surface changes and the symmetry of the superconducting state. Here we study the thermodynamic properties of Fe(Se$_{1-x}$S$_{x}$) for 3 compositions, $x=0$, 0.08 and 0.15, using heat-capacity and thermal-expansion measurements. With increasing S content we observe a significant reduction of the tetragonal-to-orthorhombic transition temperature T$_{s}$. However, this suppression of T$_{s}$ is counterintuitively accompanied by an enhancement of the orthorhombic distortion $\delta$ below T$_c$, which clearly indicates that superconductivity favors the nematic state. In parallel, the superconducting transition temperature T$_{c}$ is sizeably enhanced, whereas the increase of the Sommerfeld coefficient $\gamma_{n}$ is quite moderate. In the T$\to$ 0 limit, an unusually large residual density of states is found for $x>0$ indicative of significant substitution-induced disorder. We discuss these observations in the context of $s+d$ superconducting-state symmetry.