Insensitivity of superconductivity to disorder in the cuprates

TL;DR

This study uses quantum Monte Carlo simulations to explore how local disorder affects d-wave superconductivity in cuprates, revealing a complex interplay between impurity potential, spin correlations, and superconducting stability.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of disorder effects on superconductivity in cuprates, incorporating electronic correlations and impurity scattering.

Findings

Initial Tc increase due to enhanced spin correlations

Subsequent Tc decrease from impurity scattering

Weak initial Tc dependence aligns with experimental observations

Abstract

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.