Chiral superconductivity in the alternate stacking compound 4Hb-TaS 2

• Published in: Science advances 2020-03, Vol.6 (13), p.eaax9480
• Main Authors: Ribak, A, Skiff, R Majlin, Mograbi, M, Rout, P K, Fischer, M H, Ruhman, J, Chashka, K, Dagan, Y, Kanigel, A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2375-2548; 2375-2548
• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax9480

Van der Waals materials offer unprecedented control of electronic properties via stacking of different types of two-dimensional materials. A fascinating frontier, largely unexplored, is the stacking of strongly correlated phases of matter. We study 4Hb-TaS , which naturally realizes an alternating stacking of 1T-TaS and 1H-TaS structures. The former is a well-known Mott insulator, which has recently been proposed to host a gapless spin-liquid ground state. The latter is a superconductor known to also host a competing charge density wave state. This raises the question of how these two components affect each other when stacked together. We find a superconductor with a of 2.7 Kelvin and anomalous properties, of which the most notable one is a signature of time-reversal symmetry breaking, abruptly appearing at the superconducting transition. This observation is consistent with a chiral superconducting state.