Controlling unconventional superconductivity in artificially engineered $f$-electron Kondo superlattices

TL;DR

This paper reports on the fabrication and study of engineered Kondo superlattices combining superconducting and magnetic heavy-fermion layers, revealing how interfaces influence unconventional superconductivity and magnetic interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to create and analyze atomic-layer Kondo superlattices with tailored magnetic and superconducting properties.

Findings

Superconductivity is affected by local inversion symmetry breaking at interfaces.

Superconducting and magnetic layers coexist and interact through interfaces.

Fabrication of diverse hybrid superlattices enables new studies of correlated electron phenomena.

Abstract

Unconventional superconductivity and magnetism are intertwined on a microscopic level in a wide class of materials, including high-$T_c$ cuprates, iron pnictides, and heavy-fermion compounds. A new approach to this most fundamental and hotly debated subject focuses on the role of interactions between superconducting electrons and bosonic fluctuations at the interface between adjacent layers in heterostructures. A recent state-of-the-art molecular-beam-epitaxy technique has enabled us to fabricate superlattices consisting of different heavy-fermion compounds with atomic thickness. These Kondo superlattices provide a unique opportunity to study the mutual interaction between unconventional superconductivity and magnetic order through the atomic interface. Here, we design and fabricate hybrid Kondo superlattices consisting of alternating layers of superconducting CeCoIn$_5$ with $d$-wave pairing symmetry and nonmagnetic metal YbCoIn$_5$ or antiferromagnetic heavy fermion metals, such as CeRhIn$_5$ and CeIn$_3$. In these Kondo superlattices, superconducting heavy electrons are confined within the two-dimensional CeCoIn$_5$ block layers and interact with the neighboring nonmagnetic or magnetic layers through the interface. In CeCoIn$_5$/YbCoIn$_5$ superlattices, the superconductivity is strongly influenced by the local inversion symmetry breaking at the interface. In CeCoIn$_5$/CeRhIn$_5$ and CeCoIn$_5$/CeIn$_3$ superlattices, the superconducting and antiferromagnetic states coexist in spatially separated layers, but their mutual coupling via the interface significantly modifies the superconducting and magnetic properties. The fabrication of a wide variety of hybrid superlattices paves a new way to study the relationship between unconventional superconductivity and magnetism in strongly correlated materials.