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Nematic superconducting state in iron pnictide superconductors.

Jun LiPaulo J PereiraJie YuanYang-Yang LvMei-Ping JiangDachuan LuZi-Quan LinYong-Jie LiuJun-Feng WangLiang LiXiaoxing KeGustaaf Van TendelooMeng-Yue LiHai-Luke FengTakeshi HatanoHua-Bing WangPei-Heng WuKazunari YamauraEiji Takayama-MuromachiJohan VanackenLiviu F ChibotaruVictor V Moshchalkov
Published in: Nature communications (2017)
Nematic order often breaks the tetragonal symmetry of iron-based superconductors. It arises from regular structural transition or electronic instability in the normal phase. Here, we report the observation of a nematic superconducting state, by measuring the angular dependence of the in-plane and out-of-plane magnetoresistivity of Ba0.5K0.5Fe2As2 single crystals. We find large twofold oscillations in the vicinity of the superconducting transition, when the direction of applied magnetic field is rotated within the basal plane. To avoid the influences from sample geometry or current flow direction, the sample was designed as Corbino-shape for in-plane and mesa-shape for out-of-plane measurements. Theoretical analysis shows that the nematic superconductivity arises from the weak mixture of the quasi-degenerate s-wave and d-wave components of the superconducting condensate, most probably induced by a weak anisotropy of stresses inherent to single crystals.
Keyphrases
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