Inhomogeneous Superconducting Phase in the Heavy-Fermion Compound CeRhIn5

Tuson Park

Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, Korea


    Anisotropic, spatially inhomogeneous electronic states often emerge in materials with low symmetry of the underlying crystalline structure. Recently it has been proposed that novel electronic phases with real-space inhomogeneity could arise in strongly correlated systems even without changing the underlying crystalline structure. In this presentation we discuss evidence for the inhomogeneous superconducting phase in the heavy-fermion compound CeRhIn5. When antiferromagnetism and unconventional superconductivity coexist in CeRhIn5 there is a significant temperature difference between resistively and thermodynamically determined transitions into the superconducting state. In this state, anisotropic transport near the superconducting transition reveals the emergence of textured superconducting planes that appear without a change in translational symmetry of the lattice. We note that these behaviors are not unique in CeRhIn5, indicating that textured superconductivity may be a general consequence of coexisting orders in correlated electron materials.

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