Discovery of tip induced unconventional superconductivity on Weyl semimetal

• 来源期刊: 科学通报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（6）
• 页码范围: 425-430
• 页数: 6页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Weyl fermion is a massless Dirac fermion with definite chirality,which has been long pursued since 1929.Though it has not been observed as a fundamental particle in nature,Weyl fermion can be realized as low-energy excitation around Weyl point in Weyl semimetal,which possesses Weyl fermion cones in the bulk and nontrivial Fermi arc states on the surface.As a firstly discovered Weyl semimetal,TaAs crystal possesses 12 pairs of Weyl points in the momentum space,which are topologically protected against small perturbations.Here,we report for the first time the tip induced superconductivity on TaAs crystal by point contact spectroscopy.The zero bias conductance peak as well as a conductance plateau with double conductance peaks and sharp double dips are observed in the point contact spectra simultaneously,indicating unconventional superconductivity.Our further theoretical study suggests that the induced superconductivity may have nontrivial topology.The present work opens a new route in investigating the novel superconducting states based on Weyl materials.