Pauli-limit violation and re-entrant superconductivity in moiré graphene

Abstract

Moiré quantum matter has emerged as a materials platform in which correlated and topological phases can be explored with unprecedented control. Among them, magic-angle systems constructed from two or three layers of graphene have shown robust superconducting phases with unconventional characteristics1–5. However, direct evidence of unconventional pairing remains to be experimentally demonstrated. Here we show that magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene exhibits superconductivity up to in-plane magnetic fields in excess of 10 T, which represents a large (2–3 times) violation of the Pauli limit for conventional spin-singlet superconductors6,7. This is an unexpected observation for a system that is not predicted to have strong spin–orbit coupling. The Pauli-limit violation is observed over the entire superconducting phase, which indicates that it is not related to a possible pseudogap phase with large superconducting amplitude pairing. Notably, we observe re-entrant superconductivity at large magnetic fields, which is present over a narrower range of carrier densities and displacement fields. These findings suggest that the superconductivity in magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene is likely to be driven by a mechanism that results in non-spin-singlet Cooper pairs, and that the external magnetic field can cause transitions between phases with potentially different order parameters. Our results demonstrate the richness of moiré superconductivity and could lead to the design of next-generation exotic quantum matter. A large violation of the Pauli limit and re-entrant superconductivity in a magnetic field is reported for magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene, suggesting that the spin configuration of the superconducting state of this material is unlikely to consist of spin singlets.