Effects of Disorder on Superconductivity of Systems with Coexisting Itinerant Electrons and Local Pairs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how diagonal disorder in local pair energies affects superconductivity in a coexisting local pairs and itinerant electrons system, revealing complex behaviors including suppression, enhancement, and disorder-induced superconductivity.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of disorder effects on a boson-fermion model, highlighting phenomena like disorder-induced superconductivity and disorder-induced bound pair formation.

Findings

Disorder can suppress or enhance T_c depending on parameters.

Increasing disorder can induce a transition from mixed to BCS-like behavior.

Disorder can lead to the formation of bound pairs of itinerant electrons.

Abstract

We study the influence of diagonal disorder (random site energy) of local pair (LP) site energies on the superconducting properties of a system of coexisting local pairs and itinerant electrons described by the (hard-core) boson-fermion model. Our analysis shows that the properties of such a model with s-wave pairing can be very strongly affected by the diagonal disorder in LP subsystem (the randomness of the LP site energies). This is in contrast with the conventional s-wave BCS superconductors, which according to the Anderson's theorem are rather insensitive to the diagonal disorder (i.e. to nonmagnetic impurities). It has been found that the disorder effects depend in a crucial way on the total particle concentration n and the LP level position DELTA_o and depending on the parameters the system can exhibit various types of superconducting behaviour, including the LP-like, intermediate (MIXED)and the 'BCS'-like. In the extended range of {n,DELTA_o} the superconducting ordering is suppressed by the randomness of the LP site energies and the increasing disorder induces a changeover from the MIXEDlike behaviour to the BCS-like one, connected with abrupt reduction of T_c and energy gap to zero. However, there also exist a definite range of {n,DELTA_o} in which the increasing disorder has a quite different effect: namely it can substantially enhance T_c or even lead to the phenomenon which can be called disorder induced superconductivity. Another interesting effect is a possibility of a disorder induced bound pair formation of itinerant electrons, connected with the change-over to the LP-like regime.