No Arabic abstract
We investigate the influence of extended scatterers on the finite temperature and finite frequency microwave conductivity of d-wave superconductors. For this purpose we generalize a previous treatment by Durst and Lee, which is based on a nodal approximation of the quasiparticle excitations and scattering processes, and apply it to the analysis of experimental spectra of YBCO-123 and BSCCO-2212. For YBCO, we find that accounting for a slight spatial extension of the strong scattering in-plane defects improves the fit of the low temperature microwave conductivity to experiment. With respect to BSCCO we conclude that it is necessary to include a large concentration of weak-to-intermediate strength extended scatterers, which we attribute to the out-of plane disorder introduced by doping. These findings for BSCCO are consistent with similar analyses of the normal state ARPES spectra and of STM spectra in the superconducting state, where an enhanced forward scattering has been inferred as well.
Within the framework of the kinetic energy driven superconducting mechanism, the effect of the extended impurity scatterers on the quasiparticle transport of cuprate superconductors in the superconducting state is studied based on the nodal approximation of the quasiparticle excitations and scattering processes. It is shown that there is a cusplike shape of the energy dependent microwave conductivity spectrum. At low temperatures, the microwave conductivity increases linearly with increasing temperatures, and reaches a maximum at intermediate temperature, then decreases with increasing temperatures at high temperatures. In contrast with the dome shape of the doping dependent superconducting gap parameter, the minimum microwave conductivity occurs around the optimal doping, and then increases in both underdoped and overdoped regimes.
We discuss a new mechanism of microwave absorption in s- and d-wave superconductors, which arises in the presence of a dc supercurrent in the system. It produces a contribution to the ac conductivity that is proportional to the inelastic quasiparticle relaxation time. This contribution also determines the supercurrent dependence of the conductivity. It may significantly exceed the conventional contribution because in typical superconductors the inelastic relaxation time is several orders of magnitude longer than the elastic one. We show that the aforementioned contribution to the conductivity may be expressed in terms of the single particle density of states in superconductors in the presence of a dc supercurrent. Our results may enable determination of the inelastic relaxation time in superconductors from microwave absorption measurements.
We present a self-consistent real space formulation of spin-fluctuation mediated d-wave pairing. By calculating all relevant inhomogeneous spin and charge susceptibilities in real space within the random phase approximation (RPA), we obtain the effective pairing interaction and study its spatial dependence near both local potential and hopping impurities. A remarkably large enhancement of the pairing interaction may be obtained near the impurity site. We discuss the relevance of our result to inhomogeneities observed by scanning tunneling spectroscopy on the surface of cuprate superconductors.
The concept of broken symmetry, that the symmetry of the vacuum may be lower than the Hamiltonian of a quantum theory, plays an important role in modern physics. A manifestation of this phenomena is the Higgs boson in particle physics whose long awaited discovery is imminent. An equivalent mode in superconductors is implicit in the early theories of their collective fluctuations. Spurred by some mysterious experimental results, the theory of the oscillation of the amplitude of superconductivity order parameter, which is the equivalent to the Higgs modes in s-wave superconductors and its identification in the experiments, was explicitly provided. It was also shown that a necessary condition for this to occur is the emergent Lorentz invariance in the superconducting state while the metallic state and the region just below $T_c$ is manifestly non-Lorentz invariant. Here we show that d-wave superconductors, such as the high temperature Cuprate superconductors, should have a rich assortment of Higgs bosons, each in a different irreducible representation of the point-group symmetries of the lattice. We also show that these modes have a characteristic singular spectral structure which can be discovered in Raman scattering experiments.
In the theoretical analyses of impurity effects in superconductors the assumption is usually made that all quantities, except for the Green functions, are slowly varying functions of energy. When this so-called Fermi Surface Restricted Approximation is combined with the assumption that impurities can be represented by delta-function potentials of arbitrary strength, many reasonable looking results can be obtained. The agreement with experiments is not entirely satisfactory and one reason for this might be the assumption that the impurity potential has zero range. The generalization to finite range potentials appears to be straightforward, independent of the strength of the potential. However, the selfenergy resulting from scattering off finite range impurities of infinite strength such as hard spheres, diverges in this approximation at frequencies much larger than the gap amplitude! To track down the source of this unacceptable result we consider the normal state. The elementary results for scattering off a hard sphere, including the result that even an infinitely strong delta-function potential does not lead to scattering at all in systems of two and more dimensions, are recovered only when the energy dependencies of all quantities involved are properly taken into account. To obtain resonant scattering, believed to be important for the creation of mid-gap states, the range of the potential is almost as important as its strength.