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The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Benjamin H. Williams, which was incorrectly given as Benjamin H. Willams. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.
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Topological insulators exhibit a metallic surface state in which the directions of the carriers' momentum and spin are locked together. This characteristic property, which lies at the heart of proposed applications of topological insulators, protects carriers in the surface state from back-scattering unless the scattering centres are time-reversal symmetry breaking (i.e. magnetic). Here, we introduce a method of probing the effect of magnetic scattering by decorating the surface of topological insulators with molecules, whose magnetic degrees of freedom can be engineered independently of their electrostatic structure. We show that this approach allows us to separate the effects of magnetic and non-magnetic scattering in the perturbative limit. We thereby confirm that the low-temperature conductivity of SmB6 is dominated by a surface state and that the momentum of quasiparticles in this state is particularly sensitive to magnetic scatterers, as expected in a topological insulator.
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Unconventional superconductivity typically occurs in materials in which a small change of a parameter such as bandwidth or doping leads to antiferromagnetic or Mott insulating phases. As such competing phases are approached, the properties of the superconductor often become increasingly exotic. For example, in organic superconductors and underdoped high-T(c) cuprate superconductors a fluctuating superconducting state persists to temperatures significantly above T(c). By studying alloys of quasi-two-dimensional organic molecular metals in the κ-(BEDT-TTF)2X family, we reveal how the Nernst effect, a sensitive probe of superconducting phase fluctuations, evolves in the regime of extreme Mott criticality. We find strong evidence that, as the phase diagram is traversed through superconductivity towards the Mott state, the temperature scale for superconducting fluctuations increases dramatically, eventually approaching the temperature at which quasiparticles become identifiable at all.
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On cooling through the transition temperature T(c) of a conventional superconductor, an energy gap develops as the normal-state charge carriers form Cooper pairs; these pairs form a phase-coherent condensate that exhibits the well-known signatures of superconductivity: zero resistivity and the expulsion of magnetic flux (the Meissner effect). However, in many unconventional superconductors, the formation of the energy gap is not coincident with the formation of the phase-coherent superfluid. Instead, at temperatures above the critical temperature a range of unusual properties, collectively known as 'pseudogap phenomena', are observed. Here we argue that a key pseudogap phenomenon-fluctuating superconductivity occurring substantially above the transition temperature-could be induced by the proximity of a Mott-insulating state. The Mott-insulating state in the kappa-(BEDT-TTF)2X organic molecular metals can be tuned, without doping, through superconductivity into a normal metallic state as a function of the parameter t/U, where t is the tight-binding transfer integral characterizing the metallic bandwidth and U is the on-site Coulomb repulsion. By exploiting a particularly sensitive probe of superconducting fluctuations, the vortex-Nernst effect, we find that a fluctuating regime develops as t/U decreases and the role of Coulomb correlations increases.
