Effects of impurities in noncentrosymmetric superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how impurities influence the superconducting properties of noncentrosymmetric materials, revealing effects on critical temperature, spin susceptibility, and pairing channels, with implications for understanding unconventional superconductivity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of impurity effects on critical temperature, spin susceptibility, and pairing symmetry in noncentrosymmetric superconductors, highlighting deviations from conventional theories.

Findings

Impurities cause anisotropic mixing of electron states due to spin-orbit coupling.

Critical temperature behavior is similar to multi-band centrosymmetric superconductors.

Scalar impurities can mix singlet and triplet pairing channels, affecting upper critical field.

Abstract

Effects of disorder on superconducting properties of noncentrosymmetric compounds are discussed. Elastic impurity scattering, even for scalar impurities, leads to a strongly anisotropic mixing of the electron states in the bands split by the spin-orbit coupling. We focus on the calculation of the critical temperature, the upper critical field, and the spin susceptibility. It is shown that the impurity effects on the critical temperature are similar to those in multi-band centrosymmetric superconductors, in particular, Anderson's theorem holds for isotropic singlet pairing. In contrast, scalar impurities affect the spin susceptibility in the same way as spin-orbit impurities do in centrosymmetric superconductors. Another peculiar feature is that in the absence of inversion symmetry scalar disorder can mix singlet and triplet pairing channels. This leads to significant deviations of the upper critical field from the predictions of the Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg theory in the conventional centrosymmetric case.