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

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. 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 (refs. ). 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. 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.