Energy Sciences

Motivated by the recent experiment indicating that superconductivity in the doped topological insulator CuxBi2Se3 has an odd-parity pairing symmetry with rotational symmetry breaking, we study the general class of odd-parity superconductors with two-component order parameters in trigonal and hexagonal crystal systems. In the presence of strong spin-orbit interaction, we find two possible superconducting phases below Tc, a time-reversal-breaking (i.e., chiral) phase and an anisotropic (i.e., nematic) phase, and determine their relative energetics from the gap function in momentum space. The nematic superconductor generally has a full quasiparticle gap, whereas the chiral superconductor with a three-dimensional (3D) Fermi surface has point nodes with lifted spin degeneracy, resulting in itinerant Majorana fermions in the bulk and topological Majorana arcs on the surface.