Repulsion-Driven $p - i p$ Superconductivity in a Single Valley Revealed by DMRG
Abstract
We demonstrate repulsion-driven topological superconductivity of a single species of Dirac fermions, motivated by valley-polarized phases observed in two-dimensional materials such as rhombohedral graphene. Using density-matrix renormalization group calculations on the Qi-Wu-Zhang lattice model on cylinders of width up to eight, we find a robust phase of spinless chiral p-wave superconductivity. Pairing already starts at low doping and thus occurs on a small, nearly isotropic Fermi pocket, and is therefore not tied to the particular details or anisotropy of the dispersion but instead seems tied to the non-trivial quantum geometry of the bands. In fact, the winding of the superconductor order parameter is opposite ("p−ip") to that of the anomalous Hall metal which forms the parent state, in agreement with expectations recently derived from weak coupling calculations. At larger doping, we find that a pair-density-wave component develops alongside zero-momentum pairing. Our work shows that the combination of strong repulsion, absence of time-reversal in the parent state, and non-trivial quantum geometry form a promising platform to realize topological superconductivity.
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BibTeX
@misc{gallegos2026repulsiondriven,
title = {{Repulsion-Driven $p - i p$ Superconductivity in a Single Valley Revealed by DMRG}},
author = {Cesar A. Gallegos and Omid Tavakol and Christopher Yang and Steven R. White and Thomas Scaffidi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.30365},
eprint = {2609.30365},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30365},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Repulsion-Driven $p - i p$ Superconductivity in a Single Valley Revealed by DMRG
AU - Cesar A. Gallegos
AU - Omid Tavakol
AU - Christopher Yang
AU - Steven R. White
AU - Thomas Scaffidi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/24
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.30365
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30365
AB - We demonstrate repulsion-driven topological superconductivity of a single species of Dirac fermions, motivated by valley-polarized phases observed in two-dimensional materials such as rhombohedral graphene. Using density-matrix renormalization group calculations on the Qi-Wu-Zhang lattice model on cylinders of width up to eight, we find a robust phase of spinless chiral p-wave superconductivity. Pairing already starts at low doping and thus occurs on a small, nearly isotropic Fermi pocket, and is therefore not tied to the particular details or anisotropy of the dispersion but instead seems tied to the non-trivial quantum geometry of the bands. In fact, the winding of the superconductor order parameter is opposite ("p−ip") to that of the anomalous Hall metal which forms the parent state, in agreement with expectations recently derived from weak coupling calculations. At larger doping, we find that a pair-density-wave component develops alongside zero-momentum pairing. Our work shows that the combination of strong repulsion, absence of time-reversal in the parent state, and non-trivial quantum geometry form a promising platform to realize topological superconductivity.
ER -