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Monolayer FeSe on SrTiO₃ exhibits high-temperature superconductivity with an electron-only Fermi surface, raising fundamental questions about its unconventional pairing mechanism. Motivated by recent Josephson scanning tunneling microscopy evidence for nodeless d-wave superconductivity, we investigate the microscopic role of the Fe dxy orbital using an experimentally constrained multiorbital theory. A tight-binding model fitted to quasiparticle interference and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy reveals substantial dxy character near the Fermi level and dominant nearest-neighbor hopping, in contrast to the conventional kinetic-frustration picture of iron-based superconductors. Both itinerant spin-fluctuation calculations and strong-coupling exchange approaches favor a robust d-wave pairing state, whose interband pairing components allow a fully gapped quasiparticle spectrum. We further establish a symmetry-based selection rule for spatial Josephson tunneling, revealing characteristic bond-centered maxima and mirror-enforced interference zeros that distinguish d-wave pairing from competing s-wave states. These symmetry-enforced nodal lines survive near Fe-site impurities, while a pronounced contrast between the d- and s-wave Josephson patterns persists around vortices despite the loss of mirror protection. Our results connect the unconventional dxy electronic structure to nodeless d-wave superconductivity and demonstrate the power of spatial Josephson interference for resolving pairing symmetry in multiorbital superconductors.
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Mei et al. (2026) studied this question.
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