We study an electronic model of a two-dimensional
s-wave superconductor in a random potential using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The superfluid density and the strength of the delta function in the optical conductivity are found to vanish beyond a critical disorder. We calculate the temperature-dependent resistivity ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{dc}}(T)$ for a highly disordered interacting Fermi system. Using this we identify the nonsuperconducting state as an insulator.
In this article we study superconductor-insulator transitions within the general framework of an attractive Hubbard model. This is a well-defined model of s-wave superconductivity which permits different tuning parameters (disorder and field). Furthermore, it allows a comparison of various analytical and computational approaches in order to gain a complete understanding of the various effects of amplitude and phase fluctuations. We present a systematic pedagogical approach, aiming to equip the lay reader with enough apparatus to be able to understand the numerical calculations, reproduce some of the simpler results, and be able to tackle future problems related to inhomogeneous phases. We go into considerable detail on mean-field theory (MFT) and the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) approach, as these are a first line of attack which can capture much of the physics, but we also outline cases where this fails to capture phase fluctuations and more sophisticated Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations are necessary. We discuss the behavior of many observables, including densities of states, superfluid stiffness, and dynamical conductivity, for the disorder-tuned superconductor-insulator transition. We also discuss SITs tuned by parallel magnetic field, which are quite different due to pairbreaking.
We calculate the dynamical conductivity σðωÞ and the bosonic (pair) spectral function PðωÞ from quantum Monte Carlo simulations across clean and disorder-driven superconductor-insulator transitions (SITs).We identify characteristic energy scales in the superconducting and insulating phases that vanish at the transition due to enhanced quantum fluctuations, despite the persistence of a robust fermionic gap across the SIT.Disorder leads to enhanced absorption in σðωÞ at low frequencies compared to the SIT in a clean system.Disorder also expands the quantum critical region, due to a change in the universality class, with an underlying T ¼ 0 critical point with a universal low-frequency conductivity σ Ã ≃ 0.5ð4e 2 =hÞ.
In previous studies of the half-filled bilayer attractive Hubbard model [Prasad et al., Phys. Rev. A 89, 043605 (2014); Prasad, Phys. Rev. B 106, 184506 (2022)], it has been shown that the clean system has a band-insulator (BI) to superfluid (SF) quantum phase transition. In this paper, we append the effects of random on-site disorder on the kinetic energy, double occupancy, and the pair-pair correlations in the bilayer model. Using the determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulation, we observe that the on-site random disorder plays a significant role in the localization of on-site pairs, and hence in the reduction of the effective hopping. This results in an increase of the double occupancy, which is an effect that is similar to the attractive interaction. We find no change in the critical value of the interaction at which the model undergoes a transition from the BI to SF regime, even though the pair-pair correlations get suppressed for finite on-site disorder strengths
Vd/t=0.1--0.8. We also confirm that the weak-disorder suppresses the SF phase largely in the strong-coupling limit. Hence the region of the SF phase reduces in the presence of random on-site disorder. Finally, through finite-size scaling, we have estimated the critical disorder strength ${V}_{d}^{c}/t\ensuremath{\sim}1.44$ at
∣U∣/t=5.
We numerically study the superconductor-insulator phase transition in a model disordered two-dimensional (2D) superconductor as a function of applied magnetic field. The calculation involves quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the
(2+1)D XY model in the presence of both disorder and magnetic field. The
XY coupling is assumed to have the form $\ensuremath{-}J\text{ }\text{cos}({\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{j}\ensuremath{-}{A}_{ij})$, where
Aij has a mean of zero and a standard deviation $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$. In a real system, such a model would be approximately realized by a 2D array of small Josephson-coupled grains with slight spatial disorder and a uniform applied magnetic field. The different values $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$ then correspond to an applied field such that the average number of flux quanta per plaquette has various integer values
N: larger
N corresponds to larger $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$. For any value of $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$, there appears to be a critical coupling constant ${K}_{c}(\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij})=\sqrt{{[J/(2U)]}_{c}}$, where
U is the charging energy, below which the system is a Mott insulator; there is also a corresponding critical conductivity ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{\ensuremath{\ast}}(\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij})$ at the transition. For $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}=\ensuremath{\infty}$, the order parameter of the transition is a renormalized coupling constant
g. Using a numerical technique appropriate for disordered systems, we show that the transition at this value of $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$ takes place from an insulating (I) phase to a Bose glass (BG) phase, and that the dynamical critical exponent characterizing this transition is $z\ensuremath{\sim}1.3$. By contrast,
z=1 for this model at $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}=0$. We suggest that the superconductor-to-insulator transition is actually of this I to BG class at all nonzero $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$'s, and we support this interpretation by both numerical evidence and an analytical argument based on the Harris criterion [A. B. Harris, J. Phys. C 7, 1671 (1974)].
Kc is found to be a monotonically increasing function of $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$. For certain values of
K, a disordered Josephson array may undergo a transition from an ordered, Bose glass phase to an insulator with increasing $\ensuremath{\Delta}{A}_{ij}$.