Large superconducting diode effect indicates nonuniform triplet pairing in UTe2
The superconducting diode effect (SDE) is characterized by unequal critical current magnitudes for opposite-polarity current flow, owing to broken spatial-inversion and time-reversal symmetries. For a superconducting pair wavefunction to spontaneously break inversion symmetry implies the formation of Cooper pairs with nonzero momentum, yielding a nonuniform superconducting state. For singlet superconductors, the formation of such a (FFLO) state has long been understood to provide an escape from high field Pauli pair-breaking -- how and why such an effect might occur for equal spin pairing is an open question. Here we report the observation of a large SDE in bulk specimens of the three-dimensional heavy-fermion triplet superconductor UTe$_2$, with a peak diode efficiency of 33% at the high magnetic field strength of 33.6 T, representing the highest-field observation of the SDE to date. Crucially, this nonreciprocal transport is strictly confined to a narrow field regime where superconductivity coexists with a field-induced spin-polarized state near a first-order metamagnetic phase boundary. The absence of the SDE away from this slender phase-intersection argues strongly against purely extrinsic vortex pinning asymmetries. Instead, our findings indicate spontaneous inversion symmetry breaking accompanied by finite-momentum Cooper pairing. We model this behavior using a phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau theory, demonstrating that the intertwining of magnetic and triplet superconducting orders can stabilize an odd-parity FFLO state.