Unusual crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer to Bose-Einstein-condensate superconductivity in iron chalcogenides

Abstract

AbstractThe BCS-BEC (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer–Bose-Einstein-condensate) crossover from strongly overlapping Cooper pairs to non-overlapping composite bosons in the strong coupling limit has been a long-standing issue of interacting many-body fermion systems. Recently, FeSe semimetal with hole and electron bands emerged as a high-transition-temperature (high-Tc) superconductor located in the BCS-BEC crossover regime, owing to its very small Fermi energies. In FeSe, however, an ordinary BCS-like heat-capacity jump is observed at Tc, posing a fundamental question on the characteristics of the BCS-BEC crossover. Here we report on high-resolution heat capacity, magnetic torque, and scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements in FeSe1−xSx. Upon entering the tetragonal phase at x > 0.17, where nematic order is suppressed, Tc discontinuously decreases. In this phase, highly non-mean-field behaviours consistent with BEC-like pairing are found in the thermodynamic quantities with giant superconducting fluctuations extending far above Tc, implying the change of pairing nature. Moreover, the pseudogap formation, which is expected in BCS-BEC crossover of single-band superconductors, is not observed in the tunneling spectra. These results illuminate highly unusual features of the superconducting states in the crossover regime with multiband electronic structure and competing electronic instabilities.