Effect of Impurity Scattering on the Nonlinear Microwave Response in High-Tc Superconductors

TL;DR

This paper theoretically examines how nonmagnetic impurities influence the nonlinear microwave response in high-Tc superconductors, revealing effects not captured by previous models and aligning with experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a new theoretical framework accounting for impurity effects on nonlinear conductivity, improving understanding of intermodulation distortion in high-Tc superconductors.

Findings

Impurities significantly affect the real and imaginary parts of nonlinear conductivity.

Final-states interaction enhances the real part over the imaginary part.

The model explains experimental results with rf and dc fields.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate intermodulation distortion in high-Tc superconductors. We study the effect of nonmagnetic impurities on the real and imaginary parts of nonlinear conductivity. The nonlinear conductivity is proportional to the inverse of temperature owing to the dependence of the damping effect on energy, which arises from the phase shift deviating from the unitary limit. It is shown that the final-states interaction makes the real part predominant over the imaginary part. These effects have not been included in previous theories based on the two-fluid model, enabling a consistent explanation for the experiments with the rf and dc fields.