This Physics department Condensed Matter Physics Talk is scheduled for Friday, April 10, from 12:00-1:00 pm in Room 152. Refreshments are served from 11:45 am – 12:00 pm in the same room.

Discovery of an Unconventional Superconducting Phase on the 3-D Dirac Semi-metal Cd3As2
Dr. Goutam Sheet, Assistant Professor of Physics & DST Ramanujan Fellow, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (ISER), Mohali, India

In this talk I will present our recent work on the discovery of a novel superconducting phase at mesoscopic point-contacts between a metal and the 3-D semi-metal Cd3As2. Bulk Cd3As2 is not known to be a superconductor but when mesoscopic point-contacts are formed on Cd3As2 the point-contacts show superconductivity up to a critical temperature of 8 K. By performing Andreev reflection spectroscopy on such point-contacts we have measured an energy gap which is high (6 meV) and does not change much with temperature up to 13 K. This indicates an unconventional nature of the superconducting phase. We also see a pronounced zero-bias conductance peak which might be attributed to topological superconductivity. Furthermore, from our experiments with ferromagnetic point-contacts on Cd3As2 we show the signature of a p-wave component in the order parameter of the new superconducting phase.