Influence of structural disorder and Coulomb interactions in the superconductor-insulator transition applied to boron doped diamond

TL;DR

This paper investigates how structural and Coulomb disorder influence superconductivity in boron-doped diamond, revealing that structural disorder significantly affects the density of states and pairing, explaining experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed theoretical analysis of disorder effects in boron-doped diamond superconductors using inhomogeneous BdG theory and the attractive Hubbard model.

Findings

Structural disorder greatly impacts the density of states and superfluid density.

Structural disorder can increase pairing amplitude but reduce the spectral gap.

Disorder effects explain saturation of T_c and deviations from BCS behavior in experiments.

Abstract

The influence of disorder, both structural (non-diagonal) and on-site (diagonal), is studied through the inhomogeneous Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) theory in narrow-band disordered superconductors with a view towards understanding superconductivity in boron doped diamond (BDD) and boron- doped nanocrystalline diamond (BNCD) films. We employ the attractive Hubbard model within the mean field approximation, including the Coulomb interaction between holes in the narrow acceptor band. We study substitutional boron incorporation in a triangular lattice, with disorder in the form of random potential fluctuations at the boron sites. The role of structural disorder was studied through non-uniform variation of the tight-binding coupling parameter where, following ex- perimental findings, we incorporate the concurrent increase in structural disorder with increasing boron concentration. We illustrate stark differences between the effects of structural and on-site disorder and show that structural disorder has a much greater effect on the density of states, mean pairing amplitude and superfluid density than on-site potential disorder. We show that structural disorder can increase the mean pairing amplitude while the spectral gap in the density of states decreases with states eventually appearing within the spectral gap for high levels of disorder. This study illustrates how the effects of structural disorder can explain some of the features found in superconducting BDD and BNCD films such as a tendency towards saturation of the T_{c} with boron doping and deviations from the expected BCS theory in the temperature dependence of the pairing amplitude and spectral gap.