Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2505.00069 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Superfluid weight of strongly inhomogeneous superconductors

Jonathan Schirmer, Enrico Rossi

Published Oct 7, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In this work, we obtain the superfluid weight of strongly inhomogeneous superconductors. We find that, in general, the response of the superconductor's pairing potential to the perturbing vector potential is essential to obtain the correct value of the superfluid weight. We consider two exemplary cases: the case when strong inhomogeneities in the pairing potential are induced by a periodic potential, and the case when superconducting vortices are induced by an external magnetic field. For both cases we show that the correction to the superfluid weight due to the response of the paring potential to the perturbing vector potential can be significant, it must be included to obtain quantitatively correct results, and that for the case when vortices are present the expression of the superfluid weight that does not include such correction returns qualitatively wrong results. The results are directly relevant for superconducting states in moir\'e multilayer where the almost inevitable spatial variations of the magic angle and the proximity of superconductivity to anisotropic phases induce inhomogeneities in the pairing potential, and to the efforts to optimally pin superconducting vortices to achieve large superconducting critical currents.

DOI
10.1103/9gc8-q16z

Related papers

Bounds on the superconducting transition temperature

Mohit Randeria

I summarize recent progress on obtaining rigorous upper bounds on superconducting transition temperature [Formula: see text] in two dimensions independent of pairing mechanism or interaction strength. These results are derived by finding a general upper bound for the superfluid stiffness for a multi-band system with arbitrary interactions, with the only assumption that the external vector potential couples to the kinetic energy and not to the interactions. This bound is then combined with the universal relation between the superfluid stiffness and the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless [Formula: see text] in 2D. For parabolic dispersion, one obtains the simple result that [Formula: see text], which has been tested in recent experiments. More generally, the bounds are expressed in terms of the optical spectral weight and lead to stringent constraints for the [Formula: see text] of low-density, strongly correlated superconductors. Results for [Formula: see text] bounds for models of flat-band superconductors, where the kinetic energy vanishes and the vector potential must couple to interactions, are briefly summarized. Upper bounds on [Formula: see text] in 3D remains an open problem, and I describe how questions of universality underlie the challenges in 3D.

Modern Physics Letters B•Oct 28, 2024•0 citations

Superconductivity, generalized random phase approximation and linear scaling methods

Sebastiano Peotta

Abstract The superfluid weight is an important observable of superconducting materials since it is related to the London penetration depth of the Meissner effect. It can be computed from the change in the grand potential (or free energy) in response to twisted boundary conditions in a torus geometry. Here we review the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer mean-field theory emphasizing its origin as a variational approximation for the grand potential. The variational parameters are the effective fields that enter in the mean-field Hamiltonian, namely the Hartree–Fock potential and the pairing potential. The superfluid weight is usually computed by ignoring the dependence of the effective fields on the twisted boundary conditions. However, it has been pointed out in recent works that this can lead to unphysical results, particularly in the case of lattice models with flat bands. As a first result, we show that taking into account the dependence of the effective fields on the twisted boundary conditions leads in fact to the generalized random phase approximation. Our second result is providing the mean-field grand potential as an explicit function of the one-particle density matrix. This allows us to derive the expression for the superfluid weight within the generalized random phase approximation in a transparent manner. Moreover, reformulating mean-field theory as a well-posed minimization problem in terms of the one-particle density matrix is a first step towards the application to superconducting systems of the linear scaling methods developed in the context of electronic structure theory.

arXiv:2204.12163•New Journal of Physics•Oct 27, 2022•6 citations

Inhomogeneous pairing in highly disordereds-wave superconductors

Amit Ghosal, Mohit Randeria, Nandini Trivedi

We study a simple model of a two-dimensional s-wave superconductor in the presence of a random potential as a function of disorder strength. We first use the Bogoliubov--de Gennes (BdG) approach to show that, with increasing disorder, the pairing amplitude becomes spatially inhomogeneous, and the system cannot be described within conventional approaches for studying disordered superconductors that assume a uniform order parameter. In the high-disorder regime, we find that the system breaks up into superconducting islands, with large pairing amplitude, separated by an insulating sea. We show that this inhomogeneity has important implications for the physical properties of this system, such as superfluid density and the density of states. We find that a finite spectral gap persists in the density of states, even in the weak-coupling regime, for all values of disorder, and we provide a detailed understanding of this remarkable result. We next generalize Anderson's idea of the pairing of exact eigenstates to include an inhomogeneous pairing amplitude, and show that it is able to qualitatively capture many of the nontrivial features of the full BdG analysis. Finally, we study the transition to a gapped insulating state driven by quantum phase fluctuations about the inhomogeneous superconducting state.

arXiv:cond-mat/0012304•Physical review. B, Condensed matter•Nov 29, 2001•332 citations

Universal suppression of superfluid weight by non-magnetic disorder in $s$-wave superconductors independent of quantum geometry and band dispersion

Alexander Lau, Sebastiano Peotta, Dmitry I. Pikulin +2 more

Motivated by the experimental progress in controlling the properties of the energy bands in superconductors, significant theoretical efforts have been devoted to study the effect of the quantum geometry and the flatness of the dispersion on the superfluid weight. In conventional superconductors, where the energy bands are wide and the Fermi energy is large, the contribution due to the quantum geometry is negligible, but in the opposite limit of flat-band superconductors the superfluid weight originates purely from the quantum geometry of Bloch wave functions. Here, we study how the energy band dispersion and the quantum geometry affect the disorder-induced suppression of the superfluid weight. In particular, we consider non-magnetic disorder and s-wave superconductivity. Surprisingly, we find that the disorder-dependence of the superfluid weight is universal across a variety of models, and independent of the quantum geometry and the flatness of the dispersion. Our results suggest that a flat-band superconductor is as resilient to disorder as a conventional superconductor.

arXiv:2203.01058•SciPost Physics•Oct 7, 2022•13 citations

Vortices in spatially inhomogeneous superfluids

Daniel E. Sheehy, Leo Radzihovsky

We study vortices in a radially inhomogeneous superfluid, as realized by a trapped degenerate Bose gas in a uniaxially symmetric potential. We show that, in contrast to a homogeneous superfluid, an off-axis vortex corresponds to an anisotropic superflow whose profile strongly depends on the distance to the trap axis. One consequence of this superflow anisotropy is vortex precession about the trap axis in the absence of an imposed rotation. In the complementary regime of a finite prescribed rotation, we compute the minimum-energy vortex density, showing that in the rapid-rotation limit it is extremely uniform, despite a strongly inhomogeneous (nearly) Thomas-Fermi condensate density ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}(r)$. The weak radially dependent contribution $[\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\nabla}}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{ln}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}(r)]$ to the vortex distribution, that vanishes with the number of vortices ${N}_{v}$ as $1∕{N}_{v}$, arises from the interplay between vortex quantum discreteness (namely their inability to faithfully support the imposed rigid-body rotation) and the inhomogeneous superfluid density. This leads to an enhancement of the vortex density at the center of a typical concave trap, a prediction that is in quantitative agreement with recent experiments. One striking consequence of the inhomogeneous vortex distribution is an azimuthally directed, radially shearing superflow.

arXiv:cond-mat/0406205•Physical Review A•Dec 27, 2004•60 citations

Moment of Inertia of Superfluid Many-Fermion Systems

Ronald M. Rockmore

The effects of possible superfluidity on the cranking moment of a large many-fermion system moving under periodic boundary conditions are investigated within the framework of the theory of superconductivity recently formulated by Bogolyubov. The Hamiltonian is initially subjected to Bogolyubov's general unitary transformation. The collective excitations of the fermions are then considered in the usual pair approximation; the appropriate cranking terms are linear in the boson pair operators. On performing a unitary transformation which transforms away these linear terms, one obtains an expression for the moment of inertia of the system which includes both the effects of possible superfluidity and collective excitation. This expression, by virtue of its being stationary with respect to arbitrary variations in the amplitude associated with the latter unitary transformation, is then utilized as a variational principle for the moment of inertia. For the normal state, the result previously obtained by the author, that the moment of inertia has the rigid value, is rederived in more compact form. For the superfluid state, one finds that collective excitations effect a marked increase in the superfluid moment at intermediate coupling strengths although the resulting moment is still quite small compared to the rigid value. In contrast to the normal state case, where particle-hole pairs play a major role, this increase is almost entirely due to excitations consisting of particle-pairs or hole-pairs. The precise magnitude of the apparent resonance in the moment produced by the $d$-wave part of the cranking interaction is dependent to some extent on the features of the particle-particle potential which leads to the superfluid state. Variational expressions for the moment are exhibited for both Yukawa and delta-function shell potentials. These results are identical in charged and neutral Fermi systems. A calculation of the cranking moment at finite temperatures is presented in an Appendix along with an interpretation of it in terms of Bardeen's two-fluid model of superconductivity.

Physical Review•Jun 15, 1960•11 citations
In this work, we obtain the superfluid weight of strongly inhomogeneous superconductors. We find that, in general, the response of the superconductor's pairing potential to the perturbing vector potential is essential to obtain the correct value of the superfluid weight. We consider two exemplary cases: the case when strong inhomogeneities in the pairing potential are induced by a periodic potential, and the case when superconducting vortices are induced by an external magnetic field. For both cases we show that the correction to the superfluid weight due to the response of the paring potential to the perturbing vector potential can be significant, it must be included to obtain quantitatively correct results, and that for the case when vortices are present the expression of the superfluid weight that does not include such correction returns qualitatively wrong results. The results are directly relevant for superconducting states in moir'e multilayer where the almost inevitable spatial variations of the magic angle and the proximity of superconductivity to anisotropic phases induce inhomogeneities in the pairing potential, and to the efforts to optimally pin superconducting vortices to achieve large superconducting critical currents.
I summarize recent progress on obtaining rigorous upper bounds on superconducting transition temperature [Formula: see text] in two dimensions independent of pairing mechanism or interaction strength. These results are derived by finding a general upper bound for the superfluid stiffness for a multi-band system with arbitrary interactions, with the only assumption that the external vector potential couples to the kinetic energy and not to the interactions. This bound is then combined with the universal relation between the superfluid stiffness and the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless [Formula: see text] in 2D. For parabolic dispersion, one obtains the simple result that [Formula: see text], which has been tested in recent experiments. More generally, the bounds are expressed in terms of the optical spectral weight and lead to stringent constraints for the [Formula: see text] of low-density, strongly correlated superconductors. Results for [Formula: see text] bounds for models of flat-band superconductors, where the kinetic energy vanishes and the vector potential must couple to interactions, are briefly summarized. Upper bounds on [Formula: see text] in 3D remains an open problem, and I describe how questions of universality underlie the challenges in 3D.
Abstract The superfluid weight is an important observable of superconducting materials since it is related to the London penetration depth of the Meissner effect. It can be computed from the change in the grand potential (or free energy) in response to twisted boundary conditions in a torus geometry. Here we review the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer mean-field theory emphasizing its origin as a variational approximation for the grand potential. The variational parameters are the effective fields that enter in the mean-field Hamiltonian, namely the Hartree–Fock potential and the pairing potential. The superfluid weight is usually computed by ignoring the dependence of the effective fields on the twisted boundary conditions. However, it has been pointed out in recent works that this can lead to unphysical results, particularly in the case of lattice models with flat bands. As a first result, we show that taking into account the dependence of the effective fields on the twisted boundary conditions leads in fact to the generalized random phase approximation. Our second result is providing the mean-field grand potential as an explicit function of the one-particle density matrix. This allows us to derive the expression for the superfluid weight within the generalized random phase approximation in a transparent manner. Moreover, reformulating mean-field theory as a well-posed minimization problem in terms of the one-particle density matrix is a first step towards the application to superconducting systems of the linear scaling methods developed in the context of electronic structure theory.
We study a simple model of a two-dimensional s-wave superconductor in the presence of a random potential as a function of disorder strength. We first use the Bogoliubov--de Gennes (BdG) approach to show that, with increasing disorder, the pairing amplitude becomes spatially inhomogeneous, and the system cannot be described within conventional approaches for studying disordered superconductors that assume a uniform order parameter. In the high-disorder regime, we find that the system breaks up into superconducting islands, with large pairing amplitude, separated by an insulating sea. We show that this inhomogeneity has important implications for the physical properties of this system, such as superfluid density and the density of states. We find that a finite spectral gap persists in the density of states, even in the weak-coupling regime, for all values of disorder, and we provide a detailed understanding of this remarkable result. We next generalize Anderson's idea of the pairing of exact eigenstates to include an inhomogeneous pairing amplitude, and show that it is able to qualitatively capture many of the nontrivial features of the full BdG analysis. Finally, we study the transition to a gapped insulating state driven by quantum phase fluctuations about the inhomogeneous superconducting state.
Universal suppression of superfluid weight by non-magnetic disorder in sss-wave superconductors independent of quantum geometry and band dispersion
Motivated by the experimental progress in controlling the properties of the energy bands in superconductors, significant theoretical efforts have been devoted to study the effect of the quantum geometry and the flatness of the dispersion on the superfluid weight. In conventional superconductors, where the energy bands are wide and the Fermi energy is large, the contribution due to the quantum geometry is negligible, but in the opposite limit of flat-band superconductors the superfluid weight originates purely from the quantum geometry of Bloch wave functions. Here, we study how the energy band dispersion and the quantum geometry affect the disorder-induced suppression of the superfluid weight. In particular, we consider non-magnetic disorder and s-wave superconductivity. Surprisingly, we find that the disorder-dependence of the superfluid weight is universal across a variety of models, and independent of the quantum geometry and the flatness of the dispersion. Our results suggest that a flat-band superconductor is as resilient to disorder as a conventional superconductor.
We study vortices in a radially inhomogeneous superfluid, as realized by a trapped degenerate Bose gas in a uniaxially symmetric potential. We show that, in contrast to a homogeneous superfluid, an off-axis vortex corresponds to an anisotropic superflow whose profile strongly depends on the distance to the trap axis. One consequence of this superflow anisotropy is vortex precession about the trap axis in the absence of an imposed rotation. In the complementary regime of a finite prescribed rotation, we compute the minimum-energy vortex density, showing that in the rapid-rotation limit it is extremely uniform, despite a strongly inhomogeneous (nearly) Thomas-Fermi condensate density ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}(r)$. The weak radially dependent contribution $[\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\nabla}}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{ln}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}(r)]$ to the vortex distribution, that vanishes with the number of vortices Nv{N}_{v}Nv​ as 1∕Nv1∕{N}_{v}1∕Nv​, arises from the interplay between vortex quantum discreteness (namely their inability to faithfully support the imposed rigid-body rotation) and the inhomogeneous superfluid density. This leads to an enhancement of the vortex density at the center of a typical concave trap, a prediction that is in quantitative agreement with recent experiments. One striking consequence of the inhomogeneous vortex distribution is an azimuthally directed, radially shearing superflow.
The effects of possible superfluidity on the cranking moment of a large many-fermion system moving under periodic boundary conditions are investigated within the framework of the theory of superconductivity recently formulated by Bogolyubov. The Hamiltonian is initially subjected to Bogolyubov's general unitary transformation. The collective excitations of the fermions are then considered in the usual pair approximation; the appropriate cranking terms are linear in the boson pair operators. On performing a unitary transformation which transforms away these linear terms, one obtains an expression for the moment of inertia of the system which includes both the effects of possible superfluidity and collective excitation. This expression, by virtue of its being stationary with respect to arbitrary variations in the amplitude associated with the latter unitary transformation, is then utilized as a variational principle for the moment of inertia. For the normal state, the result previously obtained by the author, that the moment of inertia has the rigid value, is rederived in more compact form. For the superfluid state, one finds that collective excitations effect a marked increase in the superfluid moment at intermediate coupling strengths although the resulting moment is still quite small compared to the rigid value. In contrast to the normal state case, where particle-hole pairs play a major role, this increase is almost entirely due to excitations consisting of particle-pairs or hole-pairs. The precise magnitude of the apparent resonance in the moment produced by the ddd-wave part of the cranking interaction is dependent to some extent on the features of the particle-particle potential which leads to the superfluid state. Variational expressions for the moment are exhibited for both Yukawa and delta-function shell potentials. These results are identical in charged and neutral Fermi systems. A calculation of the cranking moment at finite temperatures is presented in an Appendix along with an interpretation of it in terms of Bardeen's two-fluid model of superconductivity.