Using the non-equilibrium Keldysh formalism, we solve the equations of motion for electron-phonon superconductivity, including an ultrafast pump field. We present results for time-dependent photoemission spectra out of equilibrium which probes the dy
namics of the superconducting gap edge. The partial melting of the order by the pump field leads to oscillations at twice the melted gap frequency, a hallmark of the Higgs or amplitude mode. Thus the Higgs mode can be directly excited through the nonlinear effects of an electromagnetic field and detected without any additional symmetry breaking.
The redistribution of electrons in an ultrafast pump-probe experiment causes significant changes to the effective interaction between electrons and bosonic modes. We study the influence of these changes on pump-probe photoemission spectroscopy for a
model electron-phonon coupled system using the nonequilibrium Keldysh formalism. We show that spectral rearrangement due to the driving field preserves an overall sum rule for the electronic self-energy, but modifies the effective electron-phonon scattering as a function of energy. Experimentally, this pump-modified scattering can be tracked by analyzing the fluence or excitation energy dependence of population decay rates and transient changes in dispersion kinks.
We investigate the dual roles of a cobalt impurity in the Ba-122 ferropnictide superconductor in the state with coexisting collinear spin density wave (SDW) order as a dopant and as a scattering center, using first principles electronic structure met
hods. The Co atom is found to dope the FeAs plane where it is located with a single delocalized electron as expected, but also induces a strong perturbation of the SDW ground state of the system. This in turn induces a stripe-like modulation of the density of states in nearby planes which may be observable in STM experiments. The defect is found to have an intermediate strength nonmagnetic scattering potential with a range of roughly 1 Angstrom, and the Co gives rise to a smaller but longer range magnetic scattering potential. The impurity potential in both channels is highly anisotropic, reflecting the broken symmetry of the SDW ground state. We give values for the effective Co potentials for each d orbital on the impurity and nearby sites. The calculation also shows a clear local resonance comprised of Co states about 200meV above the Fermi level, in quantitative agreement with a recent report from STM. Finally, we discuss the issue of the effective dimensionality of the 122 materials, and show that the hybridization of the out-of-phase As atoms leads to a higher density of states between the FeAs planes relative to the 1111 counterparts.
Using a dynamical cluster quantum Monte Carlo approximation, we investigate the effect of local disorder on the stability of d-wave superconductivity including the effect of electronic correlations in both particle-particle and particle-hole channels
. With increasing impurity potential, we find an initial rise of the critical temperature due to an enhancement of anti-ferromagnetic spin correlations, followed by a decrease of Tc due to scattering from impurity-induced moments and ordinary pairbreaking. We discuss the weak initial dependence of Tc on impurity concentration found in comparison to experiments on cuprates.
