The Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory is very successful in describing the pairing symmetry, a fundamental characterization of the broken symmetries in a paired superfluid or superconductor. However, GL theory does not describe fermionic excitations such as Bogoliubov quasiparticles or Andreev bound states that are directly related to topological properties of the superconductor. In this work, we show that the symmetries of the fermionic excitations are captured by a Projective Symmetry Group (PSG), which is a group extension of the bosonic symmetry group in the superconducting state. We further establish a correspondence between the pairing symmetry and the fermion PSG. When the normal and superconducting states share the same spin rotational symmetry, there is a simpler correspondence between the pairing symmetry and the fermion PSG, which we enumerate for all 32 crystalline point groups. We also discuss the general framework for computing PSGs when the spin rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken in the superconducting state. This PSG formalism leads to experimental consequences, and as an example, we show how a given pairing symmetry dictates the classification of topological superconductivity.
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Open a new pathway in an existing or a new research direction, with clear potential for multi-pronged follow-up work
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Author comments upon resubmission
We thank both the referees for their careful review of our manuscript. We have made the requested changes and addressed the comments in the two referees' reports, respectively.
List of changes
1. We have added a paragraph at the end of Sec. 3 to address the case of spatial symmetry. 2. We have added a paragraph in Section 4.4 to clarify the subject under study. 3. We have added a paragraph about the case of multi-dimensional irreps in Sec. 5.1. 4. We have added references 18-20 concerning the experimental detection of the fermion PSG. 5. We have added Appendix C with details on the use of GAP program. 6. We have corrected typos we have found upon a careful reading of the manuscript.
