Nonreciprocal current in noncentrosymmetric Rashba superconductors

TL;DR

This paper theoretically demonstrates that in Rashba superconductors, the two-component order parameter significantly enhances magnetochiral anisotropy, revealing a superconducting analogue of ferroelectric phenomena in transport.

Contribution

It introduces the concept that the two-component nature of the order parameter in Rashba superconductors greatly amplifies magnetochiral anisotropy, a novel transport phenomenon.

Findings

Gigantic enhancement of magnetochiral anisotropy in the fluctuation region.

Superconducting analogue of ferroelectric phenomena.

Role of two-component order parameter in noncentrosymmetric superconductors.

Abstract

Noncentrosymmetric superconductors with broken inversion symmetry $P$ offer rich physical phenomena such as the upper critical magnetic field $H_{c2}$ beyond the Pauli limit and magnetoelectric effect. The relativistic spin-orbit interaction (SOI) plays an essential role in these novel phenomena, which lifts the Kramers degeneracy at each $\mathbf{k}$-point, and leads to the mixing of the spin singlet-even parity and spin triplet odd-parity parings. On the other hand, the time-reversal symmetry $T$ relates the two states at $\mathbf{k}$ and $-\mathbf{k}$ points with the opposite spins, and the external magnetic field $B$ further breaking $T$ leads to the directional dependence of the nonlinear resistivity called magnetochiral anisotropy (MCA). Here we demonstrate theoretically that the two-component nature of the order parameter, i.e., even and odd pairings, leads to the gigantic enhancement of the MCA in the fluctuation region, in Rashba superconductor as a representative example of noncentrosymmetric system. This reveals the superconducting analogue of "ferroelectric" appearing in the transport phenomena.