No Arabic abstract
Highly disordered superconductors have a rich phase diagram. At a moderate magnetic field (B) the samples go through the superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition. In the insulating phase, the resistance increases sharply with B up to a magneto-resistance peak beyond which the resistance drops with B. In this manuscript we follow the temperature (T) evolution of this magneto-resistance peak. We show that as T is reduced, the peak appears at lower Bs approaching the critical field of the superconductor-insulator transition. Due to experimental limitations we are unable to determine whether the T=0 limiting position of the peak matches that of the critical field or is at comparable but slightly higher B. We show that, although the peak appears at different B values, its resistance follows an activated T dependence over a large T range with a prefactor that is very similar to the quantum of resistance for cooper-pairs.
Recent photoemission data in the high temperature cuprate superconductor Bi2212 have been interpreted in terms of a sharp spectral peak with a temperature independent lifetime, whose weight strongly decreases upon heating. By a detailed analysis of the data, we are able to extract the temperature dependence of the electron self-energy, and demonstrate that this intepretation is misleading. Rather, the spectral peak loses its integrity above Tc due to a large reduction in the electron lifetime.
A model of charged hole-pair bosons, with long range Coulomb interactions and very weak interlayer coupling, is used to calculate the order parameter -Phi- of underdoped cuprates. Model parameters are extracted from experimental superfluid densities and plasma frequencies. The temperature dependence -Phi(T)- is characterized by a trapezoidal shape. At low temperatures, it declines slowly due to harmonic phase fluctuations which are suppressed by anisotropic plasma gaps. Above the single layer Berezinski-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) temperature, Phi(T) falls rapidly toward the three dimensional transition temperature. The theoretical curves are compared to c-axis superfluid density data by H. Kitano et al., (J. Low Temp. Phys. 117, 1241 (1999)) and to the -transverse nodal velocity- measured by angular resolved photoemmission spectra on BSCCO samples by W.S. Lee et al., (Nature 450, 81 (2007)), and by A. Kanigel, et al., (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 157001 (2007)).
We study disorder effects upon the temperature behavior of the upper critical magnetic field in attractive Hubbard model within the generalized $DMFT+Sigma$ approach. We consider the wide range of attraction potentials $U$ - from the weak coupling limit, where superconductivity is described by BCS model, up to the strong coupling limit, where superconducting transition is related to Bose - Einstein condensation (BEC) of compact Cooper pairs, formed at temperatures significantly higher than superconducting transition temperature, as well as the wide range of disorder - from weak to strong, when the system is in the vicinity of Anderson transition. The growth of coupling strength leads to the rapid growth of $H_{c2}(T)$, especially at low temperatures. In BEC limit and in the region of BCS - BEC crossover $H_{c2}(T)$ dependence becomes practically linear. Disordering also leads to the general growth of $H_{c2}(T)$. In BCS limit of weak coupling increasing disorder lead both to the growth of the slope of the upper critical field in the vicinity of transition point and to the increase of $H_{c2}(T)$ in low temperature region. In the limit of strong disorder in the vicinity of the Anderson transition localization corrections lead to the additional growth of $H_{c2}(T)$ at low temperatures, so that the $H_{c2}(T)$ dependence becomes concave. In BCS - BEC crossover region and in BEC limit disorder only slightly influences the slope of the upper critical field close to $T_{c}$. However, in the low temperature region $H_{c2}(T)$ may significantly grow with disorder in the vicinity of the Anderson transition, where localization corrections notably increase $H_{c2}(T=0)$ also making $H_{c2}(T)$ dependence concave.
At finite temperatures and magnetic fields, type-II superconductors in the mixed state have a non-zero resistance that is overwhelmingly associated with vortex motion. In this work we study amorphous indium oxide films, which are thicker than the superconducting coherence length, and show that near $B_{c2}$ their resistance in the presence of perpendicular and in-plane magnetic fields becomes almost isotropic. Up to a linear rescaling of the magnetic fields both the equilibrium resistance as well as the non-equilibrium current-voltage characteristics are insensitive to magnetic field orientation suggesting that, for our superconductors, there is no fundamental difference in transport between perpendicular and in-plane magnetic fields. Additionally we show that this near-isotropic behavior extends to the insulating phase of amorphous indium oxide films of larger disorder strength that undergo a magnetic field driven superconductor-insulator transition. This near-isotropic behavior raises questions regarding the role of vortices in transport and the origin of resistance in thin-film superconductors.
The zero-bias conductance peak in d-wave superconductors splits in an applied magnetic field. In this work, the experimentally observed universal relation delta ~ B0^(1/2) for strip-shaped samples is derived analytically based on the long-ranged current contributions from Abrikosov vortices inside the sample. The result is in full agreement with observed key properties, and features such as hysteresis effects are made accessible. Employing a magnetically induced additional order parameter is not necessary for the physical explanation of the universal relation.