Evidence for isotropic s-wave superconductivity in high-entropy alloys

Casey K W Leung; Xiaofu Zhang; Fabian von Rohr; Rolf Lortz; Berthold Jäck

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-16355-4

Evidence for isotropic s-wave superconductivity in high-entropy alloys

Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 27;12(1):12773. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16355-4.

Authors

Casey K W Leung¹, Xiaofu Zhang^{2

3}, Fabian von Rohr⁴, Rolf Lortz^{1

5}, Berthold Jäck^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, 200050, China.
³ CAS Center for Excellence in Superconducting Electronics, Shanghai, 200050, China.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Universiät Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland.
⁵ IAS Center for Quantum Technologies, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China.
⁶ Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. bjaeck@ust.hk.
⁷ IAS Center for Quantum Technologies, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. bjaeck@ust.hk.

Abstract

High-entropy alloys (HEA) form through the random arrangement of five or more chemical elements on a crystalline lattice. Despite the significant amount of resulting compositional disorder, a subset of HEAs enters a superconducting state below critical temperatures, [Formula: see text] K. The superconducting properties of the known HEAs seem to suffice a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) description, but little is known about their superconducting order parameter and the microscopic role of disorder. We report on magnetic susceptibility measurements on films of the superconducting HEA (TaNb)[Formula: see text](ZrHfTi)[Formula: see text] for characterizing the lower and upper critical fields [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively as a function of temperature T. Our resulting analysis of the Ginzburg-Landau coherence length and penetration depth demonstrates that HEAs of this type are single-band isotropic s-wave superconductors in the dirty limit. Despite a significant difference in the elemental composition between the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] films, we find that the observed [Formula: see text] variations cannot be explained by disorder effects.