Fig. 1: Crystal structure and summary of the main result.

a The crystal structure of the AV₃Sb₅ kagome metals. b Top-down view of the crystal structure, showing the V-kagome plane (red, blue, teal), the triangular lattice of planar Sb atoms (orange; below small gray circles), the honeycomb lattice of (brown) apical Sb (which live both above and below the V-kagome plane), and the triangular lattice of the alkali metal A (K,Rb,Cs) which live directly above the in-plane Sb. The atom sizes are not to scale and (K,Rb,Cs) have been shrunk to appear smaller than Sb for visualization purposes. c A schematic phase diagram of our envisioned scenario. T is temperature and r is a tuning parameter (e.g., pressure). For r > 0 the system is disordered, yet loop-current fluctuations can still be soft and mediate Cooper pairing. It is this superconductivity that we are studying in the current work. V-V loop currents (purple arrows in (b)) drive d + id pairing, whereas V-Sb loop currents (blue arrows in (b)) drive s^± pairing.