Quasiparticle mirages in the tunneling spectra of d-wave superconductors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that many-body effects significantly influence the Fourier transformed local density of states in d-wave superconductors, revealing quasiparticle mirages that mirror interference peaks and are crucial for understanding experimental spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating boson exchange in impurity scattering, showing how many-body effects create quasiparticle mirages in FT-LDOS of d-wave superconductors.

Findings

Quasiparticle lifetimes decrease at energies above Omega_0 without boson exchange.

Including boson exchange reveals peaks in FT-LDOS at energies mirroring interference peaks.

Quasiparticle mirages are predicted as signatures of many-body effects in experiments.

Abstract

We illustrate the importance of many-body effects in the Fourier transformed local density of states (FT-LDOS) of d-wave superconductors from a model of electrons coupled to an Einstein mode with energy Omega_0. For bias energies significantly larger than Omega_0 the quasiparticles have short lifetimes due to this coupling, and the FT-LDOS is featureless if the electron-impurity scattering is treated within the Born approximation. In this regime it is important to include boson exchange for the electron-impurity scattering which provides a `step down' in energy for the electrons and allows for long lifetimes. This many-body effect produces qualitatively different results, namely the presence of peaks in the FT-LDOS which are mirrors of the quasiparticle interference peaks which occur at bias energies smaller than ~ Omega_0. The experimental observation of these quasiparticle mirages would be an important step forward in elucidating the role of many-body effects in FT-LDOS measurements.