Title: Ising superconductivity in NbSe2 monolayers
Abstract: Recent studies on superconductivity in monolayer NbSe2 have demonstrated a giant anisotropy in the superconducting critical field. This phenomenon was quite well understood in terms of the so-called "Ising superconductivity", where the spins of Cooper pairs are strictly aligned with one particular crystallographic direction. Besides the (formally infinite) critical field anisotropy Ising superconductors (IS) have demonstrated a number of unusual and seeming exotic phenomena. IS is sometimes misleading perceived as an esoteric subset of the theory of superconductivity, which is hard to explain and even harder to understand for outsiders. In the first part of my talk I will debunk this notion and demonstrate that the physics of IS is exceedingly simple and hardly requires any formulaics to be grasped. In the second part I will make, in terms of DFT calculations, a quantitative connection with the specific material in which most of the IS studies are being performed, monolayer NbSe2; in particular, I will show that, contrary to a common misconception, NbSe2 is close to a magnetic instability and this fact cannot be ignored when discussing IS. In the third part I will discuss to what extent the existing models allow for a sizeable singlet-triplet mixing (NbSe2 had been till recently believed to be, for all intents and purposes, a singlet superconductor, but that is not necessarily the case). Up to now the talk will be based on our paper with Darshana Wickramaratne (NRL) and Daniel Agterberg (UWi), to be published in PRX. If time allows, I will also say a few words about the new experiments from the Fai Mak group in Cornell and present some results from our work in progress with Darshana and Maxim Khodas (Hebrew U) striving to explain his observations microscopically.