Theoretical Studies of Superconductor–Insulator Transitions
Yen Loh Lee, Nandini Trivedi
This chapter presents a theoretical treatment of two types of superconductor-insulator transitions — the disorder-tuned transition and the parallel-magnetic-field-tuned transition. This is performed within the framework of the attractive Hubbard model, which is a ‘minimal’ lattice model that nevertheless captures much of the essential physics. The effects of hopping, attraction, disorder, and parallel magnetic field are taken into account one by one in proressively more refined approximations, from pairing-of-exact-eigenstates to Bogoliubov-de Gennes to determinant quantum Monte Carlo. By examining the successes and failures of each approach, the chapter elucidates the role of amplitude and phase fluctuations. This pedagogical approach provides considerable details of the calculation of thermodynamic, transport, and spectral properties, such that a suitably inclined reader should be able to reproduce many of the results.
Oxford University Press eBooks•Jun 21, 2012•2 citations