Surface-acoustic-wave-induced unconventional superconducting pairing

Unconventional superconductivity is usually associated with symmetry breaking in the system. In this work, we consider the effective electron-electron pairing due to an applied surface acosutic wave (SAW) in analogy to phonon-mediated electron-electron interaction in conventional superconductors. Here, however, SAW breaks time and spatial translation symmetries and has externally defined properties such as period and shape. We study the symmetries of the possible SAW-induced order parameters, showing that odd-frequency spin-singlet odd-parity or odd-frequency spin-triplet even-parity order parameters can occur. We suggest other methods of how to engineer the symmetries of the order parameters using SAWs and the applications of such setups in quantum technologies, e.g. braiding of Majorana bound states or long-range coupling of semiconductor qubits.