No Arabic abstract
We have investigated whether the electron-phonon interaction can support a d-wave gap-anisotropy. On the basis of models derived from LDA calculations, as well as LDA linear-response calculations we argue that this is the case, for materials with buckled or dimpled CuO2 planes, for the so-called buckling modes, which involve out-of-plane movements of the plane oxygens.
Motivated by recent proposals of correlation induced insensitivity of d-wave superconductors to impurities, we develop a simple pairing theory for these systems for up to a moderate strength of disorder. Our description implements the key ideas of Anderson, originally proposed for disordered s-wave superconductors, but in addition takes care of the inherent strong electronic repulsion in these compounds, as well as disorder induced inhomogeneities. We first obtain the self-consistent one-particle states, that capture the effects of disorder exactly, and strong correlations using Gutzwiller approximation. These `normal states, representing the interplay of strong correlations and disorder, when coupled through pairing attractions following the path of Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS), produce results nearly identical to those from a more sophisticated Gutzwiller augmented Bogoliubov-de Gennes analysis.
The pairing symmetry of the newly proposed cobalt high temperature (high-$T_c$) superconductors formed by vertex shared cation-anion tetrahedral complexes is studied by the methods of mean field, random phase approximation (RPA) and functional renormalization group (FRG) analysis. The results of all these methods show that the $d_{x^2-y^2}$ pairing symmetry is robustly favored near half filling. The RPA and FRG methods, which are valid in weak interaction regions, predict that the superconducting state is also strongly orbital selective, namely the $d_{x^2-y^2}$ orbital that has the largest density near half filling among the three $t_{2g}$ orbitals dominates superconducting pairing. These results suggest that the new materials, if synthesized, can provide indisputable test to high-$T_c$ pairing mechanism and the validity of different theoretical methods.
We discuss a scenario for interface-induced superconductivity involving pairing by dipolar excitations proximate to a two-dimensional electron system controlled by a transverse electric field. If the interface consists of transition metal oxide materials, the repulsive on-site Coulomb interaction is typically strong and a superconducting state is formed via exchange of non-local dipolar excitations in the d-wave channel. Perspectives to enhance the superconducting transition temperature are discussed.
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.