Competition between superconductivity and nematic order: Anisotropy of superconducting coherence length

Abstract

We study the interplay between nematic order and superconductivity, motivated by a recent experiment on FeSe observing strongly distorted vortex shapes [Song et al., Science 332, 1410 (2011)]. We show that the nematic order strongly enhances the anisotropy in the superconducting coherence length, beyond that expected from considerations of the Ginzburg-Landau theory. We obtain universal functions describing the coupling between the nematic order and superconductivity, and discuss connections of our results to the experiments.