Stabilization of Interband Phase Solitons in Two-Band Noncentrosymmetric Superconducting Rings

Abstract

Two-band superconductors maintain a relative interband phase which can carry winding soliton excitations in a superconducting ring, supported by independent winding numbers in the two bands. In rings of superconductors obeying the inversion symmetry the interband phase solitons are metastable states, separated from the uniform ground state by the energy of screening currents. In this work we find that, breaking the inversion symmetry strongly enough, one can make the soliton a true ground state. In that case, a magneto-electric coupling, absent in centrosymmetric materials, contributes critically above a certain threshold, a relevant, free-energy term, odd with respect to the winding number, which biases the energy balance in favor of a particular winding sign. Once the bias outweighs the energy cost that originally made the soliton metastable, a phase soliton with a finite winding number becomes the ground state, with chirality set by the applied field. In current--flux measurements performed in equilibrium states, the effect is demonstrated by field-odd soliton branches, that replace the metastable ones existing in mesoscopic rings, built by two-component superconductors, realizing a magneto-electric analog of the Little--Parks fluxoid-branch physics in the interband relative-phase sector.