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arXiv:cond-mat/9902305 · International Journal of Modern Physics B

MEAN-FIELD TRANSITION TEMPERATURE OF STRONGLY DISORDERED SUPERCONDUCTORS

Igor F. Herbut

Published Mar 10, 2000• 3 citations
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Abstract

I discuss the mean-field theory of superconductivity in a strongly disordered system of fermions with short-range attraction. It is argued that in this limit the effective theory at low energies is equivalent to the disordered Bose–Hubbard model, and I consider both the infinite-range and the "nearest-neighbor" hopping of bosons between the localized states. In the infinite-range case the mean-field theory is exact, and the superconducting gap is uniform in space, while in the latter case, the gap becomes highly non-uniform in space, but, surprisingly, is finite everywhere at T < T MF . I find that the mean-field transition temperature T MF > 0 always, and argue that the superconductor–insulator transition at T = 0 in models with net attraction between fermions is in the universality class of "dirty-bosons".

DOI
10.1142/s0217979200000522

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I discuss the mean-field theory of superconductivity in a strongly disordered system of fermions with short-range attraction. It is argued that in this limit the effective theory at low energies is equivalent to the disordered Bose–Hubbard model, and I consider both the infinite-range and the "nearest-neighbor" hopping of bosons between the localized states. In the infinite-range case the mean-field theory is exact, and the superconducting gap is uniform in space, while in the latter case, the gap becomes highly non-uniform in space, but, surprisingly, is finite everywhere at T < T MF . I find that the mean-field transition temperature T MF > 0 always, and argue that the superconductor–insulator transition at T = 0 in models with net attraction between fermions is in the universality class of "dirty-bosons".
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.
The phase diagrams and phase transitions of bosons with short-ranged repulsive interactions moving in periodic and/or random external potentials at zero temperature are investigated with emphasis on the superfluid-insulator transition induced by varying a parameter such as the density. Bosons in periodic potentials (e.g., on a lattice) at T=0 exhibit two types of phases: a superfluid phase and Mott insulating phases characterized by integer (or commensurate) boson densities, by the existence of a gap for particle-hole excitations, and by zero compressibility. Generically, the superfluid onset transition in d dimensions from a Mott insulator to superfluidity is ``ideal,'' or mean field in character, but at special multicritical points with particle-hole symmetry it is in the universality class of the (d+1)-dimensional XY model. In the presence of disorder, a third, ``Bose glass'' phase exists. This phase is insulating because of the localization effects of the randomness and analogous to the Fermi glass phase of interacting fermions in a strongly disordered potential.The Bose glass phase is characterized by a finite compressibility, no gap, but an infinite superfluid susceptibility. In the presence of disorder the transition to superfluidity is argued to occur only from the Bose glass phase, and never directly from the Mott insulator. This zero-temperature superfluid-insulator transition is studied via generalizations of the Josephson scaling relation for the superfluid density at the ordinary \ensuremath{\lambda} transition, highlighting the crucial role of quantum fluctuations. The transition is found to have a dynamic critical exponent z exactly equal to d and correlation length and order-parameter correlation exponents \ensuremath{\nu} and \ensuremath{\eta} which satisfy the bounds \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\ge}2/d and \ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\le}2-d, respectively. It is argued that the superfluid-insulator transition in the presence of disorder may have an upper critical dimension dc{d}_{c}dc​ which is infinite, but a perturbative renormalization-group calculation wherein the critical exponents have mean-field values for weak disorder above d=4 is also discussed. Many of these conclusions are verified by explicit calculations on a model of one-dimensional bosons in the presence of both random and periodic potentials. The general results are applied to experiments on 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He absorbed in porous media such as Vycor. Some measurable properties of the superfluid onset are predicted exactly [e.g., the exponent x relating the \ensuremath{\lambda} transition temperature to the zero-temperature superfluid density is found to be d/2(d-1)], while stringent bounds are placed on others. Analysis of preliminary data is consistent with these predictions.
We investigate the effect of diagonal disorder on bosons in an optical lattice described by an Anderson-Hubbard model at zero temperature. It is known that within Gutzwiller mean-field theory spatially resolved calculations suffer particularly from finite system sizes in the disordered case, while arithmetic averaging of the order parameter cannot describe the Bose glass phase for finite hopping J >0. Here we present and apply a new stochastic mean-field theory which captures localization due to disorder, includes non-trivial dimensional effects beyond the mean-field scaling level and is applicable in the thermodynamic limit. In contrast to fermionic systems, we find the existence of a critical hopping strength, above which the system remains superfluid for arbitrarily strong disorder.
It is well known that the metal-insulator transition in two dimensions for non-interacting fermions takes place at infinitesimal disorder. In contrast, the superconductor-to-insulator transition takes place at a finite critical disorder (on the order of Vc ~ 2t), where V is the typical width of the distribution of random site energies and t is the hopping scale. In this article we compare the localization/delocalization properties of one and two particles. Whereas the metal-insulator transition is a consequence of single-particle Anderson localization, the superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) is due to pair localization – or, alternatively, fluctuations of the phase conjugate to pair density. The central question we address is how superconductivity emerges from localized single-particle states. We address this question using inhomogeneous mean field theory and quantum Monte Carlo techniques and make several testable predictions for local spectroscopic probes across the SIT. We show that with increasing disorder, the system forms superconducting blobs on the scale of the coherence length embedded in an insulating matrix. In the superconducting state, the phases on the different blobs are coherent across the system whereas in the insulator long-range phase coherence is disrupted by quantum fluctuations. As a consequence of this emergent granularity, we show that the single-particle energy gap in the density of states survives across the transition, but coherence peaks exist only in the superconductor. A characteristic pseudogap persists above the critical disorder and critical temperature, in contrast to conventional theories. Surprisingly, the insulator has a two-particle gap scale that vanishes at the SIT despite a robust single-particle gap.
The finite-temperature phase diagram for the two-dimensional attractive fermion Hubbard model with spin-dependent disorder is considered within Bogoliubov--de Gennes mean-field theory. Three types of disorder are studied. In the first, only one species is coupled to a random site energy; in the second, the two species both move in random site energy landscapes which are of the same amplitude but different realizations; and finally, in the third, the disorder is in the hopping rather than the site energy. For all three cases, we find that, unlike the case of spin-symmetric randomness, where the energy gap and average order parameter do not vanish as the disorder strength increases, a critical disorder strength exists separating distinct phases. In fact, the energy gap and the average order parameter vanish at distinct transitions, Vcgap{V}_{c}^{\mathrm{gap}}Vcgap​ and Vcop{V}_{c}^{\mathrm{op}}Vcop​, allowing for a gapless superconducting (gSC) phase. The gSC phase becomes smaller with increasing temperature until it vanishes at a temperature T∗{T}^{*}T∗.
The spherical limit of strongly commensurate dirty bosons is studied perturbatively at weak disorder and numerically at strong disorder in two dimensions (2D). We argue that disorder is not perfectly screened by interactions and consequently that the ground state in the effective Anderson localization problem always remains localized. As a result there is only a gapped Mott insulator phase in the theory. Comparisons with other studies and the parallel with disordered fermions in 2D are discussed. We conjecture that while for the physical cases N = 2 (XY) and N = 1 (Ising) the theory should have the ordered phase, it may not for N = 3 (Heisenberg).