Abstract
Superconductivity in copper oxide (cuprate) high-transition-temperature superconductors follows from the chemical doping of an antiferromagnetic insulating state. The consensus that the wavefunction of the superconducting carrier, the Cooper pair, has symmetry1,2 has long been reached. This pairing symmetry implies the existence of nodes in the superconducting energy gap. Recently, a series of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments3,4,5,6,7,8,9 have revealed that deeply underdoped cuprates exhibit a particle–hole symmetric3 superconducting-like energy gap at the momentum–space locations where the gap nodes are expected. Here we discuss the possibility that this phenomenon is caused by a fully gapped topological superconducting state that coexists with the antiferromagnetic order. If experimentally confirmed, this result will completely change our view of how exactly the high-temperature superconductivity state evolves from the insulating antiferromagnet.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Y. He and M. Hashimoto for useful discussions. We especially thank J. Xia for pointing out to us that Kerr rotation is a candidate experiment to probe the chiral nature of the proposed SC state. This work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division, grant DE-AC02-05CH11231 (Y-M.L., D-H.L.).
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Y-M.L. completed the symmetry/topological classification. T.X. proposed studying the ‘nodal gap’ phenomenon. D-H.L. designed the research, performed the effective theory calculation and partially carried out the symmetry/topological classification.
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Lu, YM., Xiang, T. & Lee, DH. Underdoped superconducting cuprates as topological superconductors. Nature Phys 10, 634–637 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3021
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3021
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