Quantum Geometry and Pair Breaking in Intra- and Intervalley Superconductivity of Rhombohedral Graphene

arXiv:2610.14480 · cond-mat.supr-con, cond-mat.str-el · Submitted 2026-10-10 · Read on arXiv

cond-mat.supr-con, cond-mat.str-el

Submitted: 2026-10-10

Updated: 2026-10-10

Comments: 31 pages, 5 figures

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: The observation of superconductivity emerging from a spin- and valley-polarized normal state in rhombohedral graphene raises a basic puzzle: intravalley Cooper pairs involve states that are not

Abstract

The observation of superconductivity emerging from a spin- and valley-polarized normal state in rhombohedral graphene raises a basic puzzle: intravalley Cooper pairs involve states that are not generically degenerate because of trigonal warping, and therefore lack the particle--particle nesting underlying the conventional Cooper instability. While recent model studies suggest that nontrivial band geometry can strongly promote chiral pairing, how this geometric enhancement competes with realistic band-structure-induced pair breaking remains unclear. Here we study Kohn--Luttinger superconductivity in electron-doped rhombohedral tetralayer graphene using a DFT-fitted multiorbital tight-binding model, retaining the full Bloch-wave-function form factors in both RPA screening and the projected Cooper interaction. We separate the superconducting instability into three contributions: the symmetry-resolved form-factor-dressed interaction, the Cooper-pair phase space determined by the symmetrized pair dispersion, and the energy mismatch generated by trigonal warping. We find that the Bloch form factors strongly favor intravalley pairing, with a leading predominantly p x-ip y instability and a substantially larger maximum T c than the intervalley reference state. At the same time, trigonal-warping-induced mismatch cuts off the Cooper logarithm and confines intravalley superconductivity to a much narrower region of the phase diagram. The dominant instability occurs near pair-Lifshitz transitions and primarily in reconstructed annular or three-lobed Fermi-surface regimes. Our results show that superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene is controlled by the combined effects of quantum-geometry-dressed interactions, pair fermiology, and trigonal-warping-induced pair breaking.

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