Robust Nodal Behavior in the Thermal Conductivity of Superconducting UTe2

Published

April 25, 2025

Author(s)

Ian Hayes, Tristin E. Metz, Corey Frank, Shanta R. Saha, Nicholas Butch, Vivek Mishra, P. Hirschfeld, Johnpierre Paglione

Abstract

The superconducting state of the heavy-fermion metal UTe2 has attracted considerable interest because of evidence of spin-triplet Cooper pairing and nontrivial topology. Progress on these questions requires identifying the presence or absence of nodes in the superconducting gap function and their dimension. In this article, we report a comprehensive study of the influence of disorder on the thermal transport in the superconducting state of UTe2. Through detailed measurements of the magnetic-field dependence of the thermal conductivity in the zero-temperature limit, we obtain clear evidence of the presence of point nodes in the superconducting gap for all samples with transition temperatures ranging from 1.6 to 2.1 K obtained by different synthesis methods, including a refined self-flux method. This robustness implies the presence of symmetry-imposed nodes throughout the range studied, further confirmed via disorder-dependent calculations of the thermal transport in a model with a single pair of nodes. In addition to capturing the temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity up to Tc, this model provides some information about the locations of the nodes, suggesting a B1u or B2u symmetry for the superconducting order parameter. Additionally, comparing the new, ultrahigh conductivity samples to older samples reveals a crossover between a low-field and a high-field regime at a single value of the magnetic field in all samples. In the high-field regime, the thermal conductivity at different disorder levels differs from each other by a simple offset, suggesting that some simple principle determines the physics of the mixed state, a fact which may illuminate trends observed in other clean nodal superconductors.

Citation

Physical Review X

Volume

15

Issue

2

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.15.021029

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Keywords

spin triplet superconductivity, thermal conductivity

Citation

Hayes, I. , Metz, T. , Frank, C. , Saha, S. , Butch, N. , Mishra, V. , Hirschfeld, P. and Paglione, J. (2025), Robust Nodal Behavior in the Thermal Conductivity of Superconducting UTe2, Physical Review X, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.15.021029, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957725 (Accessed July 17, 2025)