Smectic Superconductivity
Abstract
We identify a mechanism in which soft nonunitary fluctuations of the pair condensate can suppress phase coherence in a two-dimensional Rashba superconductor proximate to easy-plane ferromagnetic order. This spin polarization couples linearly to the supercurrent through a Lifshitz invariant, acting as an emergent gauge field for the superconducting U(1) phase. Integrating out soft magnetic fluctuations renormalizes the effective superfluid stiffness and drives the system into a "smectic" superconducting state, characterized by a finite-momentum helical phase texture and a long-wavelength stiffness that vanishes in one direction. Consequently, vortices no longer have a logarithmically divergent energy cost, and the quasi-long-range superconducting order is destroyed at any finite temperature. Weak lattice anisotropy pins the ferromagnetic order, cutting off the smectic-like behaviour at long wavelengths and thereby restoring a finite effective stiffness. Nonetheless, near the onset of magnetic order, the enhanced magnetic susceptibility leads to a vortex-deconfined regime for arbitrarily weak magnetoelectric coupling. The results provide insight into how intertwined superconducting and easy-plane ferromagnetic orders can reshape phase coherence, with relevance to rhombohedral graphene proximitized by a transition-metal dichalcogenide substrate.
Related
- Smectic bubbles in strong external electric fields
- Design and synthesis of photoresponsive bent-core liquid crystals exhibiting polar smectic phases
- Computing stable configurations of confined smectic liquid crystals with a deep variational framework
- Geometry-controlled active transport in smectic textures
- Altermagnetism and superconductivity: a short historical review
BibTeX
@misc{frazier2026smectic,
title = {{Smectic Superconductivity}},
author = {Grayson R. Frazier and Erez Berg},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.20932},
eprint = {2609.20932},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20932},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Smectic Superconductivity
AU - Grayson R. Frazier
AU - Erez Berg
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/17
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.20932
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20932
AB - We identify a mechanism in which soft nonunitary fluctuations of the pair condensate can suppress phase coherence in a two-dimensional Rashba superconductor proximate to easy-plane ferromagnetic order. This spin polarization couples linearly to the supercurrent through a Lifshitz invariant, acting as an emergent gauge field for the superconducting U(1) phase. Integrating out soft magnetic fluctuations renormalizes the effective superfluid stiffness and drives the system into a "smectic" superconducting state, characterized by a finite-momentum helical phase texture and a long-wavelength stiffness that vanishes in one direction. Consequently, vortices no longer have a logarithmically divergent energy cost, and the quasi-long-range superconducting order is destroyed at any finite temperature. Weak lattice anisotropy pins the ferromagnetic order, cutting off the smectic-like behaviour at long wavelengths and thereby restoring a finite effective stiffness. Nonetheless, near the onset of magnetic order, the enhanced magnetic susceptibility leads to a vortex-deconfined regime for arbitrarily weak magnetoelectric coupling. The results provide insight into how intertwined superconducting and easy-plane ferromagnetic orders can reshape phase coherence, with relevance to rhombohedral graphene proximitized by a transition-metal dichalcogenide substrate.
ER -