Anisotropic superconducting transport in rhombohedral hexalayer graphene

ORAL

Abstract



Superconductors with unconventional order parameters are often intertwined with other broken-symmetry electronic phases. Here, we investigate an unconventional superconducting phase emerging in rhombohedral hexalayer graphene. Through angle-resolved transport measurements, we demonstrate an extreme anisotropy in the superconducting transport, which resembles the observed response in the surrounding metallic phase. By examining the temperature and out-of-plane magnetic-field dependence of the transport response, we identify striking hysteretic transitions upon thermal cycling and magnetic-field sweeps, which reveals the first-order melting associated with translational symmetry breaking, and the first-order valley polarization transition associated with an orbital ferromagnet. Together, these findings reveal a superconducting state intertwined with the stripe order and orbital magnetism, in which rotational, translational, and time-reversal symmetries are simultaneously broken in rhombohedral hexalayer graphene.

*U.S. National Science Foundation under Award DMR-2143384the Air Force Office of Scientific Researchthe JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Numbers 21H05233 and 23H02052) and World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI)

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Publication: Submitted to arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05129

Presenters

  • Peiyu Qin

    • University of Texas, Austin

Authors

  • Peiyu Qin

    • University of Texas, Austin

  • HaiTian Wu

    • Brown University

  • Erin Morissette

    • Brown University

  • Naiyuan James J Zhang

    • Brown University
    • University of Washington

  • Ron Q Nguyen

    • Brown University

  • Kenji Watanabe

    • National Institute for Materials Science
    • Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute of Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan

  • Takashi Taniguchi

    • National Institute for Materials Science
    • Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science
    • International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute of Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan
    • Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute of Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan

  • J. I. A. Li

    • University of Texas, Austin
    • University of Texas at Austin