Order parameters of non-centrosymmetric superconductors

The non-centrosymmetric (NCS) superconductors (SCs), a class of novel superconducting materials, have recently attracted considerable interests. As a result of antisymmetric spin-orbital coupling (ASOC) arising from the absence of inversion symmetry, the superconducting pairing state of these compounds allows the admixture of spin-singlet and spin-triplet components. This is in contrast to other previously studied superconductors, which usually possess an inversion symmetry in their crystal structure, and therefore their pairing state is of either spin-singlet/even parity or the spin-triplet/odd parity due to the restrictions of the Pauli principles and parity conservation.#br#Determination of the gap structure is crucial for unveiling the pairing state of NCS SCs. In this article, we first describe a method of measuring the precise temperature dependence of the changes in the London penetration depth using the tunnel-diode-oscillator (TDO), which provides an important evidence for the superconducting gap structures. Then the pairing states of NCS SCs are briefly reviewed, putting the emphasis on a few compounds with different ASOC strengths. It is proposed that the ASOC may tune the ratio of the spin-triplet to the spin-singlet component and, therefore, the spin-triplet state may become dominant while the ASOC effect is sufficiently strong in NCS SCs. However, our investigations demonstrate that the actual case is more complicated and there is no simple correspondence between the ASOC size and the pairing states. Instead, it is found that the band splitting due to the ASOC effect divided by the superconducting transition temperature Tc may better characterize of the superconducting pairing states in NCS SCs.