Chiral superconductivity in the alternate stacking compound 4Hb-TaS<sub>2</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32258393.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aax9480 and PMC identifier 7101217.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
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Abstract
Van der Waals materials offer unprecedented control of electronic properties via stacking of different types of two-dimensional materials. A fascinating frontier, largely unexplored, is the stacking of strongly correlated phases of matter. We study 4Hb-TaS<sub>2</sub>, which naturally realizes an alternating stacking of 1T-TaS<sub>2</sub> and 1H-TaS<sub>2</sub> structures. The former is a well-known Mott insulator, which has recently been proposed to host a gapless spin-liquid ground state. The latter is a superconductor known to also host a competing charge density wave state. This raises the question of how these two components affect each other when stacked together. We find a superconductor with a <i>T</i> <sub>c</sub> of 2.7 Kelvin and anomalous properties, of which the most notable one is a signature of time-reversal symmetry breaking, abruptly appearing at the superconducting transition. This observation is consistent with a chiral superconducting state.