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Enhanced triplet superconductivity in next-generation ultraclean UTe 2 .

Z WuT I WeinbergerJ ChenA CabalaDmitry V ChichinadzeD ShafferJiří PospíšilJ ProkleškaT HaidamakG BastienVladimír SechovskýA J HickeyM J Mancera-UgarteS BenjaminD E GrafY SkourskiG G LonzarichM VališkaF Malte GroscheA G Eaton
Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2024)
The unconventional superconductor UTe[Formula: see text] exhibits numerous signatures of spin-triplet superconductivity-a rare state of matter which could enable quantum computation protected against decoherence. UTe[Formula: see text] possesses a complex phase landscape comprising two magnetic field-induced superconducting phases, a metamagnetic transition to a field-polarized state, along with pair- and charge-density wave orders. However, contradictory reports between studies performed on UTe[Formula: see text] specimens of varying quality have severely impeded theoretical efforts to understand the microscopic origins of the exotic superconductivity. Here, we report a comprehensive suite of high magnetic field measurements on a generation of pristine quality UTe[Formula: see text] crystals. Our experiments reveal a significantly revised high magnetic field superconducting phase diagram in the ultraclean limit, showing a pronounced sensitivity of field-induced superconductivity to the presence of crystalline disorder. We employ a Ginzburg-Landau model that excellently captures this acute dependence on sample quality. Our results suggest that in close proximity to a field-induced metamagnetic transition the enhanced role of magnetic fluctuations-that are strongly suppressed by disorder-is likely responsible for tuning UTe[Formula: see text] between two distinct spin-triplet superconducting phases.
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