Nonreciprocal impurity scattering as a probe for pairing symmetries in kagome superconductors

Abstract

The superconducting (SC) pairing symmetry and its link to time-reversal symmetry breaking (TRSB) in the vanadium-based kagome superconductors remain unresolved, with ambiguities stemming from sublattice interference and charge-density-wave (CDW) entanglement with superconductivity. Using two representative SC pairings, i.e., the conventional on-site $s$-wave and the TRSB $d_{x^2-y^2}+id_{xy}$-wave, as a model study, we theoretically show that while single magnetic impurity yield qualitatively identical spectral behavior of local density of states (LDOS) for these two symmetries, two magnetic impurities give rise to distinct LDOS patterns. For the conventional on-site $s$-wave pairing, time-reversal symmetry (TRS) enforces equivalent forward and backward scattering between two impurities across all impurity configurations, leading to near disappearance of a Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) state pair along the line connecting the two impurities. However, for the TRSB $d_{x^2-y^2}+id_{xy}$-wave pairing, this scattering equivalence holds only for inversion-symmetric impurity configurations, with a pair of YSR disappearance restricted to this case. These distinct spectral features are resolvable in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments, providing a direct avenue to discriminate TRSB and non-TRSB SC pairing symmetries in kagome superconductors and an alternative method to probe SC nonreciprocity that circumvents the ambiguities of conventional critical current-based techniques.