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arXiv:2610.25859

Effects of Nonmagnetic Impurities on Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Microwave-Driven Superconductors

Taira Kawamura

Published Oct 19, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the nonequilibrium steady states of a microwave-driven BCS superconductor in the presence of nonmagnetic impurity scattering and energy relaxation. Using the Floquet-Nambu-Keldysh Green's function method together with the self-consistent Born approximation, we self-consistently determine the superconducting order parameter in the microwave-driven steady state. We find that the nonequilibrium phase diagram depends strongly on the impurity-scattering strength. When impurity scattering is absent or weak, the steady-state order parameter is single-valued at each temperature and drive frequency. At intermediate scattering strengths, we find bistability between microwave-enhanced and microwave-suppressed superconducting states. As the impurity-scattering strength increases further, we instead find bistability between the superconducting and normal states. This evolution reflects competition between two effects of microwave driving: Eliashberg-type enhancement through the redistribution of thermally excited quasiparticles and suppression through pair-breaking-induced quasiparticle generation. In contrast to the robustness of equilibrium $s$-wave superconductivity against nonmagnetic impurity scattering, our results demonstrate that nonmagnetic impurity scattering plays a central role in determining the character of nonequilibrium superconducting phase transitions under microwave driving.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2610.25859

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We present a systematic investigation of the effects of ``nonmagnetic'' impurities on the sss-wave BCS-BEC crossover in atomic Fermi gases within a pairing fluctuation theory. Both pairing and impurity scattering TTT matrices are treated self-consistently at the same time. While the system is less sensitive to impurity scattering in the Born limit, for strong impurity scatterers, both the frequency and the gap function are highly renormalized, leading to significant suppression of the superfluid Tc{T}_{c}Tc​, the order parameter, and the superfluid density. We also find the formation of impurity bands and smearing of coherence peak in the fermion density of states, leading to a spectrum weight transfer and finite lifetime of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. In the BCS regime, the superfluidity may be readily destroyed by the impurity of high density, leading to a superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition at zero temperature. In comparison, the superfluidity in unitary and BEC regimes is relatively more robust.
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Stabilizing superconductivity beyond its equilibrium regime has been one of the quests of nonequilibrium state engineering. We report the presence of nonthermal pairing gap in BCS superconductors coupled to two thermal baths, where one of the baths can be at a temperature well above the equilibrium TcT_cTc​. Superconducting state is enabled by a highly non-equilibrium steady state stabilized by weak coupling to baths that break detailed balance condition. The steady-state is well described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble parametrized with chemical potentials for associated Bogoliubov quasiparticle. A strong, non-perturbative effect is reported for both sss-wave and ddd-wave superconductors, and its possible realization in cavity-based experiments is discussed.
Impurities coupled to superconductors offer a controlled platform to understand the interplay between superconductivity, many-body interactions, and nonequilibrium physics. In the equilibrium situation, local interactions at the impurity induce a transition from the spin-singlet to the spin-doublet ground state, resulting in a supercurrent sign reversal ($0\text{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\pi}$ transition). In this work, we apply the exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method to simulate the transient dynamics of such superconducting systems. We also use a perturbative approximation to analyze their properties at longer times. These two methods agree for a wide range of parameters. In a phase-biased situation, the system gets trapped in a metastable state characterized by a lower supercurrent compared to the equilibrium case. We show that local Coulomb interactions do not provide an effective relaxation mechanism for the initially trapped quasiparticles. In contrast, other relaxation mechanisms, such as coupling to a third normal lead, make the impurity spin relax for parameter values corresponding to the equilibrium 0 phase. For parameters corresponding to the equilibrium $\ensuremath{\pi}$ phase the impurity converges to a spin-polarized stationary state. Similar qualitative behavior is found for a voltage-biased junction, which provides an effective relaxation mechanism for the trapped quasiparticles in the junction.