Nonreciprocal charge transport up to room temperature in bulk Rashba semiconductor α-GeTe.

Nonmagnetic Rashba systems with broken inversion symmetry are expected to exhibit nonreciprocal charge transport, a new paradigm of unidirectional magnetoresistance in the absence of ferromagnetic layer. So far, most work on nonreciprocal transport has been solely limited to cryogenic temperatures, which is a major obstacle for exploiting the room-temperature two-terminal devices based on such a nonreciprocal response. Here, we report a nonreciprocal charge transport behavior up to room temperature in semiconductor α-GeTe with coexisting the surface and bulk Rashba states. The combination of the band structure measurements and theoretical calculations strongly suggest that the nonreciprocal response is ascribed to the giant bulk Rashba spin splitting rather than the surface Rashba states. Remarkably, we find that the magnitude of the nonreciprocal response shows an unexpected non-monotonical dependence on temperature. The extended theoretical model based on the second-order spin-orbit coupled magnetotransport enables us to establish the correlation between the nonlinear magnetoresistance and the spin textures in the Rashba system. Our findings offer significant fundamental insight into the physics underlying the nonreciprocity and may pave a route for future rectification devices.

Cooper instability generated by attractive fermion-fermion interaction in the two-dimensional semi-Dirac semimetals.

Cooper instability (CI) associated with superconductivity in the two-dimensional semi-Dirac semimetals is attentively studied in the presence of attractive Cooper-pairing interaction, which is the projection of an attractive fermion-fermion interaction. Performing the standard renormalization group analysis shows that the Cooper theorem is violated at zero chemical potential but instead CI can be generated only if the absolute strength of fermion-fermion coupling exceeds certain critical value and transfer momentum is restricted to a confined region, which is determined by the initial conditions. Rather, the Cooper theorem would be instantly restored once a finite chemical potential is introduced and thus a chemical potential-tuned phase transition is expected. Additionally, we briefly examine the effects of impurity scatterings on the CI at zero chemical potential, which in principle are harmful to CI although they can enhance the density of states of systems. Furthermore, the influence of competition between a finite chemical potential and impurities upon the CI is also simply investigated. These results are expected to provide instructive clues for exploring unconventional superconductors in the kinds of semimetals.