Anomalous suppression of the superfluid density in the CuxBi2Se3 superconductor upon progressive Cu intercalation

Abstract

CuxBi2Se3 was recently found to be likely the first example of a time-reversal-invariant topological superconductor accompanied by helical Majorana fermions on the surface. Here we present that progressive Cu intercalation into this system introduces significant disorder and leads to an anomalous suppression of the superfluid density which was obtained from the measurements of the lower critical field. At the same time, the transition temperature T_c is only moderately suppressed, which agrees with a recent prediction for the impurity effect in this class of topological superconductors bearing strong spin-orbit coupling. Those unusual disorder effects give support to the possible odd-parity pairing state in CuxBi2Se3.