| Literature DB >> 34670267 |
Myungchul Oh1, Kevin P Nuckolls1, Dillon Wong1, Ryan L Lee1, Xiaomeng Liu1, Kenji Watanabe2, Takashi Taniguchi3, Ali Yazdani4.
Abstract
The emergence of superconductivity and correlated insulators in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has raised the intriguing possibility that its pairing mechanism is distinct from that of conventional superconductors1-4, as described by the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory. However, recent studies have shown that superconductivity persists even when Coulomb interactions are partially screened5,6. This suggests that pairing in MATBG might be conventional in nature and a consequence of the large density of states of its flat bands. Here we combine tunnelling and Andreev reflection spectroscopy with a scanning tunnelling microscope to observe several key experimental signatures of unconventional superconductivity in MATBG. We show that the tunnelling spectra below the transition temperature Tc are inconsistent with those of a conventional s-wave superconductor, but rather resemble those of a nodal superconductor with an anisotropic pairing mechanism. We observe a large discrepancy between the tunnelling gap ΔT, which far exceeds the mean-field BCS ratio (with 2ΔT/kBTc ~ 25), and the gap ΔAR extracted from Andreev reflection spectroscopy (2ΔAR/kBTc ~ 6). The tunnelling gap persists even when superconductivity is suppressed, indicating its emergence from a pseudogap phase. Moreover, the pseudogap and superconductivity are both absent when MATBG is aligned with hexagonal boron nitride. These findings and other observations reported here provide a preponderance of evidence for a non-BCS mechanism for superconductivity in MATBG.Entities:
Year: 2021 PMID: 34670267 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04121-x
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Nature ISSN: 0028-0836 Impact factor: 49.962