Pairing Mechanism in Fe-Based Superconductors

• DOI: 10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-020911-125055
• Publication Date: 2011-03-02T01:38:05Z
• Authors: Andrey Chubukov
• Keywords: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con); Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons; Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Condensed Matter - Superconductivity; 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

I review recent works on the symmetry and the structure of the superconducting gap in Fe-based superconductors (FeSCs) and on the underlying pairing mechanism in these systems. The experimental data on superconductivity show very rich behavior, with potentially different symmetry of a superconducting state for different compositions of the same material. The variety of different pairing states raises the issue of whether the physics of FeSCs is model dependent or is universal, governed by a single underlying pairing mechanism. I argue that the physics is universal and that all pairing states obtained so far can be understood within the same universal pairing scenario and are well described by the effective low-energy model with small numbers of input parameters.