Physical Review X (Oct 2020)

Ising Superconductivity and Magnetism in NbSe_{2}

  • Darshana Wickramaratne,
  • Sergii Khmelevskyi,
  • Daniel F. Agterberg,
  • I. I. Mazin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.041003
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 4
p. 041003

Abstract

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Recent studies on superconductivity in NbSe_{2} have demonstrated a large anisotropy in the superconducting critical field when the material is reduced to a single monolayer. Motivated by this recent discovery, we use density-functional theory (DFT) calculations to quantitatively address the superconducting properties of bulk and monolayer NbSe_{2}. We demonstrate that NbSe_{2} is close to a ferromagnetic instability, and analyze our results in the context of experimental measurements of the spin susceptibility in NbSe_{2}. We show how this magnetic instability, which is pronounced in a single monolayer, can enable sizable singlet-triplet mixing of the superconducting order parameter, contrary to contemporary considerations of the pairing symmetry in monolayer NbSe_{2}, and discuss approaches as to how this degree of mixing can be addressed quantitatively within our DFT framework. Our calculations also enable a quantitative description of the large anisotropy of the superconducting critical field, using DFT calculations of monolayer NbSe_{2} in the normal state.