No Arabic abstract
We study the thermal conductivity in disordered $s$-wave superconductors. Expanding on previous works for normal metals, we develop a formalism that tackles particle diffusion as well as the weak localization (WL) and weak anti-localization (WAL) effects. Using a Greens functions diagrammatic technique, which takes into account the superconducting nature of the system by working in Nambu space, we identify the systems low-energy modes, the diffuson and the Cooperon. The time scales that characterize the diffusive regime are energy dependent; this is in contrast with the the normal state, where the relevant time scale is the mean free time $tau_e$, independent of energy. The energy dependence introduces a novel energy scale $varepsilon_*$, which in disordered superconductors ($tau_e Deltall 1$, with $Delta$ the gap) is given by $varepsilon_* = sqrt{Delta/tau_e}$. From the diffusive behavior of the low-energy modes, we obtain the WL correction to the thermal conductivity. We give explicitly expressions in two dimensions. We determine the regimes in which the correction depends explicitly on $varepsilon_*$ and propose an optimal regime to verify our results in an experiment.
The weak-localization contribution deltasigma(B) to the conductivity of a tunnel-coupled double-layer electron system is evaluated and its behavior in weak magnetic fields B perpendicular or parallel to the layers is examined. In a perpendicular field B, delta sigma(B) increases and remains dependent on tunneling as long as the magnetic field is smaller than hbar/e D tau_t, where D is the in-plane diffusion coefficient and tau_t the interlayer tunneling time. If tau_t is smaller than the inelastic scattering time, a parallel magnetic field also leads to a considerable increase of the concuctivity starting with a B**2 law and saturating at fields higher than hbar/e Z (D tau_t)**(1/2), where Z is the interlayer distance. In the limit of coherent tunneling, when tau_t is comparable to elastic scattering time, delta sigma(B) differs from that of a single-layer system due to ensuing modifications of the diffusion coefficient. A possibility to probe the weak-localization effect in double-layer systems by the dependence of the conductivity on the gate-controlled level splitting is discussed.
We investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the two-particle spectral function for a disordered $s$-wave superconductor in two dimensions, focusing on the evolution of the collective amplitude and phase modes. We find three main effects of thermal fluctuations: (a) the phase mode is softened with increasing temperature reflecting the decrease of superfluid stiffness; (b) remarkably, the non-dispersive collective amplitude modes at finite energy near ${bf q}=[0,0]$ and ${bf q}=[pi,pi]$ survive even in presence of thermal fluctuations in the disordered superconductor; and (c) the scattering of the thermally excited fermionic quasiparticles leads to low energy incoherent spectral weight that forms a strongly momentum-dependent background halo around the phase and amplitude collective modes and broadens them. Due to momentum and energy conservation constraints, this halo has a boundary which disperses linearly at low momenta and shows a strong dip near the $[pi,pi]$ point in the Brillouin zone.
It is well known that conductivity of disordered metals is suppressed in the limit of low frequencies and temperatures by quantum corrections. Although predicted by theory to exist up to much higher energies, such corrections have so far been experimentally proven only for $lesssim$80 meV. Here, by a combination of transport and optical studies, we demonstrate that the quantum corrections are present in strongly disordered conductor MoC up to at least $sim$4 eV, thereby extending the experimental window where such corrections were found by a factor of 50. The knowledge of both, the real and imaginary parts of conductivity, enables us to identify the microscopic parameters of the conduction electron fluid. We find that the conduction electron density of strongly disordered MoC is surprisingly high and we argue that this should be considered a generic property of metals on the verge of disorder-induced localization transition.
The results of experimental study of interference induced magnetoconductivity in narrow quantum well HgTe with the normal energy spectrum are presented. Analysis is performed with taking into account the conductivity anisotropy. It is shown that the fitting parameter tau_phi corresponding to the phase relaxation time increases in magnitude with the increasing conductivity (sigma) and decreasing temperature following the 1/T law. Such a behavior is analogous to that observed in usual two-dimensional systems with simple energy spectrum and corresponds to the inelasticity of electron-electron interaction as the main mechanism of the phase relaxation. However, it drastically differs from that observed in the wide HgTe quantum wells with the inverted spectrum, in which tau_phi being obtained by the same way is practically independent of sigma. It is presumed that a different structure of the electron multicomponent wave function for the inverted and normal quantum wells could be reason for such a discrepancy.
We make the first testable predictions for the local two-particle spectral function of a disordered s-wave superconductor, probed by scanning Josephson spectroscopy (sjs), providing complementary information to scanning tunneling spectroscopy (sts). We show that sjs provides a direct map of the local superconducting order parameter that is found to be anticorrelated with the gap map obtained by sts. Furthermore, this anticorrelation increases with disorder. For the momentum resolved spectral function, we find the Higgs mode shows a non-dispersive subgap feature at low momenta, spectrally separated from phase modes, for all disorder strengths. The amplitude-phase mixing remains small at low momenta even when disorder is large. Remarkably, even for large disorder and high momenta, the amplitude-phase mixing oscillates rapidly in frequency and hence do not affect significantly the purity of the Higgs and phase dominated response functions.