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arXiv:cond-mat/0007413

Quasi-Particle density of states of disordered d-wave superconductors

Bodo Huckestein, Alexander Altland

Published Jul 26, 2000• 0 citations
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Abstract

We present a numerical study of the quasi-particle density of states (DoS) of two-dimensional d-wave superconductors in the presence of smooth disorder. We find power law scaling of the DoS with an exponent depending on the strength of the disorder and the superconducting order parameter in quantitative agreement with the theory of Nersesyan et al. (Phys.Rev.Lett. 72, 2628 (1994)). For strong disorder a transition to a constant DoS occurs. Our results are in contrast to the case of short-ranged disorder.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0007413

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We present a numerical study of the quasi-particle density of states (DoS) of two-dimensional d-wave superconductors in the presence of smooth disorder. We find power law scaling of the DoS with an exponent depending on the strength of the disorder and the superconducting order parameter in quantitative agreement with the theory of Nersesyan et al. (Phys.Rev.Lett. 72, 2628 (1994)). For strong disorder a transition to a constant DoS occurs. Our results are in contrast to the case of short-ranged disorder.
Disorder in electronic systems suppresses diffusion and can lead to localization. The origin of this behavior is enhanced backscattering due to quantum interference. In addition, disorder leads to a broadening of the density of states (DoS). However, the localization properties of a disordered system are usually not discernible from a study of the DoS. It is necessary to calculate two-particle properties or consider the influence of boundary conditions on energy eigenvalues as in the study of Thouless numbers to obtain information about localization. Another feature of disordered systems is the independence of their localization properties from details of the disorder in the system. For example, the range of the disorder affects non-universal quantities like the mean-free path but does not influence whether or not the system shows localization at all. Recently, new symmetry classes came into focus that do not conform to the standard expectations about disordered systems outlined above. As we will show in this contribution, details of disorder do matter for these systems and localization properties leave their mark on the DoS. In particular, we look at a system that presents an idealization of a disordered d-wave superconductor. In our study we neglect effects of self-consistency and concentrate on the d-wave symmetry and influence of different kinds of disorder. We consider the lattice quasi-particle Hamiltonian
We explore the effects of various kinds of random disorder on the quasiparticle density of states of two-dimensional ddd-wave superconductors using an exact real-space method, incorporating realistic details known about the cuprates. Random on-site energy and pointlike unitary impurity models are found to give rise to a vanishing DOS at the Fermi energy for narrow distributions and low concentrations, respectively, and lead to a finite, but suppressed, DOS at unrealistically large levels of disorder. Smooth disorder arising from impurities located away from the copper-oxide planes meanwhile gives rise to a finite DOS at realistic impurity concentrations. For the case of smooth disorder whose average potential is zero, a resonance is found at zero energy for the quasiparticle DOS at large impurity concentrations. We discuss the implications of these results on the computed low-temperature specific heat, the behavior of which we find is strongly affected by the amount of disorder present in the system. We also compute the localization length as a function of disorder strength for various types of disorder and find that intermediate- and high-energy states are quasiextended for low disorder, and that states near the Fermi energy are strongly localized and have a localization length that exhibits an unusual dependence on the amount of disorder. We comment on the origin of disorder in the cuprates and provide constraints on these based on known results from scanning tunneling spectroscopy and specific heat experiments.
We study the effect of disorder on the superconductor-insulator transition in an inhomogeneous d-wave superconductor using the kernel polynomial method. As the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations of the two-dimensional square lattice are solved self-consistently for the cases with more than 100000 unit cells, it is possible to observe the spatial fluctuations of the superconducting order parameters at the nanoscale. We find that strong spatial fluctuation of the superconducting order parameters can be introduced by disorder, and some superconducting specific order parameters are even enhanced. Moreover, we find that some isolated superconducting “islands” can survive the strong disorder, giving a boson insulator with some localized Cooper pairs. Our numerical calculations predict the existence of two sequential transitions with the increasing disorder strength: a d-wave to s-wave superconductor transition, and then an s-wave superconductor to insulator transition. The possibility of the appearance of a metallic phase between the superconducting and insulating phases is excluded by performing the lattice-size scaling of the generalized inverse participation ratio. In addition, we also discuss the effect of disorder on the optical conductivity of the d-wave superconductors.
We developed an analytic theory of inhomogeneous superconducting pairing in strongly disordered materials, which are moderately close to superconducting-insulator transition. Single-electron eigenstates are assumed to be Anderson localized, with a large localization volume. Superconductivity develops due to coherent delocalization of originally localized preformed Cooper pairs. The key assumption of the theory is that each such pair is coupled to a large number $Z\ensuremath{\gg}1$ of similar neighboring pairs. We derived integral equations for the probability distribution $P(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$ of local superconducting order parameter $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(\mathbit{r})$ and analyzed their solutions in the limit of small dimensionless Cooper coupling constant $\ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremath{\ll}1$. The shape of the order-parameter distribution is found to depend crucially upon the effective number of nearest neighbors ${Z}_{\text{eff}}=2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{0}{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{0}Z$, with ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{0}$ being the single-particle density of states at the Fermi level. The solution we provide is valid both at large and small Zeff{Z}_{\text{eff}}Zeff​; the latter case is nontrivial as the function $P(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$ is heavily non-Gaussian. One of our key findings is the discovery of a broad range of parameters where the distribution function $P(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}})$ is non-Gaussian but also noncritical (in the sense of superconductor-insulator transition criticality). The analytic results are supplemented by numerical data and good agreement between them is observed.
In a recent Comment (cond-mat/9701197) on our Letter (PRL 77, 3013 (1996), cond-mat/9604176) Nersesyan and Tsvelik questioned the relevance of our exact calculation of the density of states (DOS) of a 2D d-wave superconductor using a Lorentzian disorder distribution, claiming ``that models with Lorentzian and Gaussian disorder belong to different universality classes'', on grounds of a comparison with a straightforward perturbation expansion in the disorder potential. We showed in a very recent paper (cond-mat/9703047) that a rigorous nonzero lower bound for DOS can be established without relying on the tails of the disorder distribution, i.e. both the Gaussian and Lorentzian distributions belong to a large class of distributions which give a nonzero lower bound for the DOS. This proves that the result of our Letter is generic.
We investigate the effect of site disorder on the superconducting state in the attractive Hubbard model within the framework of dynamical mean field theory. For a fixed interaction strength (U), the superconducting order parameter decreases monotonically with increasing disorder (x), while the single-particle spectral gap decreases for small x, reaches a minimum and keeps increasing for larger x. Thus, the system remains gapped beyond the destruction of the superconducting state, indicating a disorder-driven superconductor-insulator transition. We investigate this transition in depth considering the effects of weak and strong disorder for a range of interaction strengths. In the clean case, the order parameter is known to increase monotonically with increasing interaction, saturating at a finite value asymptotically for U→∞. The presence of disorder results in destruction of superconductivity at large U, thus drastically modifying the clean case behaviour. A physical understanding of our findings is obtained by invoking particle-hole asymmetry and the probability distributions of the order parameter and spectral gap.