Surface State Tunneling Signatures in the Two-Component Superconductor UPt_{3}

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Feb 24;118(8):087004. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.087004. Epub 2017 Feb 24.

Abstract

Quasiparticle interference (QPI) imaging of Bogoliubov excitations in quasi-two-dimensional unconventional superconductors has become a powerful technique for measuring the superconducting gap and its symmetry. Here, we present the extension of this method to three-dimensional superconductors and analyze the expected QPI spectrum for the two-component heavy-fermion superconductor UPt_{3} whose gap structure is still controversial. Starting from a 3D electronic structure and the three proposed chiral gap models E_{1g,u} or E_{2u}, we perform a slab calculation that simultaneously gives extended bulk states and topologically protected in-gap dispersionless surface states. We show that the number of Weyl arcs and their hybridization with the line node provides a fingerprint that may finally determine the true nodal structure of the UPt_{3} superconductor.