Inhomogeneous High Temperature Melting and Decoupling of Charge Denisty Waves in Spin-Triplet Superconductor UTe2

Published

May 25, 2024

Author(s)

Alexander LaFleur, Hong Li, Corey Frank, Muxian Xu, Siyu Cheng, Ziqiang Wang, Nicholas Butch, Ilija Zeljkovic

Abstract

Charge, spin and Cooper-pair density waves have now been widely detected in exotic superconductors. Understanding how these density waves emerge — and become suppressed by external parameters—is a key research direction in condensedmatter physics. Here we study the temperature and magnetic-field evolution of charge density waves in the rare spin-triplet superconductor candidate UTe2 using scanning tunnelingmicroscopy/spectroscopy.We reveal that charge modulations composed of three different wave vectors gradually weaken in a spatially inhomogeneous manner, while persisting to surprisingly high temperatures of 10–12 K.We also reveal an unexpected decoupling of the three-component charge density wave state. Our observations match closely to the temperature scale potentially related to short-range magnetic correlations, providing a possible connection between density waves observed by surface probes and intrinsic bulk features. Importantly, charge density wave modulations become suppressed with magnetic field both below and above superconducting Tc in a comparable manner. Our work points towards an intimate connection between hidden magnetic correlations and the origin of the unusual charge density waves in UTe2.

Citation

Nature Communications

Volume

15

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48844-7

Local Download

Keywords

charge density wave, spin-triplet superconductivity

Citation

LaFleur, A. , Li, H. , Frank, C. , Xu, M. , Cheng, S. , Wang, Z. , Butch, N. and Zeljkovic, I. (2024), Inhomogeneous High Temperature Melting and Decoupling of Charge Denisty Waves in Spin-Triplet Superconductor UTe2, Nature Communications, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48844-7, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956460 (Accessed October 17, 2025)