Quantum spin-liquid and chiral superconductivity in TaS₂

Van der Waals (vdW) materials offer unprecedented control of electronic properties via stacking of different types of two-dimensional materials. A fascinating frontier, largely unexplored, is the stacking of strongly correlated phases of matter. We study 4Hb-TaS₂, which naturally realizes an alternating stacking of 1T-TaS₂ and 1H-TaS₂ structures. The former is a well-known Mott insulator, which has recently been proposed to host a gapless spin-liquid ground state . The latter is a superconductor known to also host a competing charge density wave state. This raises the question of how these two components affect each other when stacked together. We find a superconductor with a T_c of 2.7 K and anomalous properties, of which the most striking one is a signature of time-reversal-symmetry breaking, abruptly appearing at the superconducting transition. This observation is consistent with a chiral superconducting state.