Fine structures in the tunneling spectra of superconductors have been widely used to identify fingerprints of the interaction responsible for Cooper pairing. Here we show that for scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of Pb, the inclusion of inelastic
tunneling processes is crucial for the proper interpretation of these fine structures. For STM the usual McMillan inversion algorithm of tunneling spectra must therefore be modified to include inelastic tunneling events, an insight that is crucial for the identification of the pairing glue in conventional and unconventional superconductors alike.
We analyze whether and how the neutron resonance mode in unconventional superconductors is affected by higher order corrections in the coupling between spin excitations and fermionic quasiparticles and find that in general such corrections cannot be
ignored. In particular, we find that in two spatial dimensions (d=2) the corrections are of same order as the leading, weak coupling contributions demonstrating that the neutron resonance mode in unconventional superconductors is a strong coupling phenomenon. The origin of this behavior lies in the quantum-critical nature of the low energy spin dynamics in the superconducting state and the feedback of the resonance mode onto the fermionic excitations. While quantum critical fluctuations occur in any dimensionality smaller than the upper critical dimension d_{uc}=3, they can be analyzed in a controlled fashion by means of the epsilon-expansion (epsilon =3-d), such that the leading corrections to the resonance mode position are small. Regardless of the strong coupling nature of the resonance mode we show that it emerges only if the phase of the superconducting gap function varies on the Fermi surface, making it a powerful tool to investigate the microscopic structure of the pair condensate.
