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Fragility of surface states in topological superfluid 3He

Heikkinen, PJ and Casey, A and Levitin, LV and Rojas, X and Vorontsov, A and Sharma, P and Zhelev, N and Parpia, JM and Saunders, J (2021) Fragility of surface states in topological superfluid 3He. In: Nature Communications, 12 (1).

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21831-y

Abstract

Superfluid 3He, with unconventional spin-triplet p-wave pairing, provides a model system for topological superconductors, which have attracted significant interest through potential applications in topologically protected quantum computing. In topological insulators and quantum Hall systems, the surface/edge states, arising from bulk-surface correspondence and the momentum space topology of the band structure, are robust. Here we demonstrate that in topological superfluids and superconductors the surface Andreev bound states, which depend on the momentum space topology of the emergent order parameter, are fragile with respect to the details of surface scattering. We confine superfluid 3He within a cavity of height D comparable to the Cooper pair diameter ξ0. We precisely determine the superfluid transition temperature Tc and the suppression of the superfluid energy gap, for different scattering conditions tuned in situ, and compare to the predictions of quasiclassical theory. We discover that surface magnetic scattering leads to unexpectedly large suppression of Tc, corresponding to an increased density of low energy bound states. © 2021, The Author(s).

Item Type: Journal Article
Publication: Nature Communications
Publisher: Nature Research
Additional Information: The copyright for this article belongs to Nature Research
Keywords: detection method; diameter; inorganic carbon; inorganic compound; insulation; supercell; superconductivity; temperature effect; topology
Department/Centre: Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited: 30 Mar 2021 11:11
Last Modified: 30 Mar 2021 11:11
URI: http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68567

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