Magnetic-field-sensitive charge density waves in the superconductor UTe 2

The intense interest in triplet superconductivity partly stems from theoretical predictions of exotic excitations such as non-Abelian Majorana modes, chiral supercurrents and half-quantum vortices 1 – 4 . However, fundamentally new and unexpected states may emerge when triplet superconductivity appears in a strongly correlated system. Here we use scanning tunnelling microscopy to reveal an unusual charge-density-wave (CDW) order in the heavy-fermion triplet superconductor UTe 2 (refs. 5 – 8 ). Our high-resolution maps reveal a multi-component incommensurate CDW whose intensity gets weaker with increasing field, with the CDW eventually disappearing at the superconducting critical field H c2 . To understand the phenomenology of this unusual CDW, we construct a Ginzburg–Landau theory for a uniform triplet superconductor coexisting with three triplet pair-density-wave states. This theory gives rise to daughter CDWs that would be sensitive to magnetic field owing to their origin in a pair-density-wave state and provides a possible explanation for our data. Our discovery of a CDW state that is sensitive to magnetic fields and strongly intertwined with superconductivity provides important information for understanding the order parameters of UTe 2 .