Unconventional superconductivity in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides

Abstract

A variety of experimental observations in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide superconductors with Ising spin-orbit coupling suggest the presence of an unconventional superconducting pairing mechanism. Some of these experiments include observation of Leggett modes and a nodal superconducting gap in STM experiments, a large in-plane upper critical field compared to the Pauli limit, and the observation of a two-fold gap anisotropy in magnetoresistance measurements. Here, we propose a superconducting pairing mechanism mediated by spin and charge fluctuations and identify the dominant superconducting instability relevant to monolayer TaS$_2$. We then explore the effect of an additional electron-phonon pairing contribution, and compare our results with recent experimental findings. In particular, our theory stabilizes a superconducting ground state with nodal-like density of states that agrees with STM experiments. The theory obtains a large in-plane upper critical field due to a combination of Ising spin-orbit coupling and even-odd parity mixing in the superconducting state. Further, we find that an in-plane magnetic field splits the degeneracy of the superconducting ground state, and the resulting two-fold symmetric superconducting order parameter could explain the gap anisotropy observed in magnetoresistance experiments. Overall, the proposed theoretical pairing model can reconcile diverse experimental observations and remains consistent with observations on other dichalcogenide superconductors such as monolayer NbSe$_2$.