Institute of Crystallography - CNR

Spin-orbit coupling controlling the superconducting dome of artificial superlattices of quantum wells

While it is known that a resonant amplification of Tc in two-gap superconductors can be driven by using the Fano-Feshbach resonance tuning the chemical potential near a Lifshitz transition, little is known on tuning the Tc resonance by cooperative interplay of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC) joint with phonon mediated (e-ph) pairing at selected k-space spots. Here, we present first-principles quantum calculation of superconductivity in an artificial heterostructure of metallic quantum wells with 3 nm period where quantum size effects give two-gap superconductivity with RSOC controlled by the internal electric field at the interface between the nanoscale metallic layers intercalated by insulating spacer layers. The key results of this work show that fundamental quantum mechanics effects including RSCO at the nanoscale [Mazziotti et al., Phys. Rev. B, 103, 024523 (2021)] provide key tools in applied physics for quantitative material design of unconventional high temperature superconductors at ambient pressure. We discuss the superconducting domes where Tc is a function of either the Lifshitz parameter (?) measuring the distance from the topological Lifshitz transition for the appearing of a new small Fermi surface due to quantum size effects with finite spin-orbit coupling and the variable e-ph coupling g in the appearing second Fermi surface linked with the energy softening of the cut off ?0.

Year
2022
Journal
Journal of applied physics (online)
Impact factor
2.877
RESEARCH AREA
KEYWORDS
Authors
Mazziotti,Maria Vittoria and Bianconi,Antonio and Raimondi,Roberto and Campi,Gaetano and Valletta,Antonio
Authors IC CNR