The Left Hand of the Electron: Anomalous Hall Transport in Chiral Superfluids & Superconductors

Date

Jul 1, 2019

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Speaker

Prof. James A. Sauls

Affiliation

Northwestern University, USA

Language

en

Main Topic

Materialien

Other Topics

Materialien

Host

Dr. Clifford Hicks

Description

Just over sixty years ago parity violation by the weak force was demonstrated in experiments led by C. S. Wu on the asymmetry of electron currents emitted in the beta decay of polarized 60Co. The asymmetry reflects two broken sym- metries - mirror refelctions and time-reversal, the latter imposed by an external magnetic field. That same year Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer published the celebrated BCS theory of superconductivity, and soon thereafter Anderson and Morel predicted that the ground-state of liquid 3He was likely a BCS condensate of chiral p-wave Cooper pairs, exhibiting spon- taneously broken mirror reflection and time-reversal symmetries. Indeed the high-pressure phase, superfluid 3He-A, discovered in 1972, is the realization of the Anderson-Morel state. However, the definitive experimental proof that 3He-A spontaneously breaks mirror and time-reversal symmetry came 41 years later with the observation an anomalous Hall effect for electrons moving in superfluid 3He-A.1 I will discuss this discovery, then present the theory of the anomalous Hall effect for electrons moving in the chiral phase of 3He.2 I explain the origin of the transverse force on an electron moving in the chiral vacuum, and discuss several implications of this theory of anomalous transport for the broad class of chiral superconductors, including candidates for chiral superconductivity: Sr2RuO4, UPt3, URu2Si2 etc.3. 1. H. Ikegami, Y. Tsutsumi, & K. Kono, Chiral Symmetry in Superfluid 3He-A, Science, 341,59–62, 2013. 2. O. Shevtsov & J. A. Sauls, Electrons & Weyl Fermions in Superfluid 3He-A, Phys. Rev. B, 94, 064511, 2016. 3. V. Ngampruetikorn & J. A. Sauls, Anomalous Thermal Hall Effect in Chiral Superconductors, in preparation (2019). † Research supported by NSF grants DMR-1508730 and PHY-1734332.

Links

• MPI CPfS

Last modified: Jun 27, 2019, 12:09:33 AM