Superconductivity in two-dimensional disordered Dirac semimetals

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different types of disorder affect superconductivity in two-dimensional Dirac semimetals, revealing that some disorders suppress it while others lead to strong coupling regimes where standard methods fail.

Contribution

It provides a renormalization group analysis of disorder effects on superconductivity, identifying which disorders suppress or enhance pairing and exploring the breakdown of perturbative methods.

Findings

Random mass and gauge potential suppress superconductivity.

Critical coupling increases with certain disorders, making pairing harder.

Strong disorder regimes require non-perturbative approaches.

Abstract

In two-dimensional Dirac semimetals, Cooper pairing instability occurs only when the attractive interaction strength $|u|$ is larger than some critical value $|u_{c}|$ because the density of states vanishes at Dirac points. Disorders enhance the low-energy density of states but meanwhile shorten the lifetime of fermions, which tend to promote and suppress superconductivity, respectively. To determine which of the two competing effects wins, we study the interplay of Cooper pairing interaction and disorder scattering by means of renormalization group method. We consider three types of disorders, including random mass, random gauge potential, and random chemical potential, and show that the first two suppress superconductivity. In particular, the critical BCS coupling $|u_{c}|$ is increased to certain larger value if the system contains only random mass or random gauge potential, which makes the onset of superconductivity more difficult. In the case of random chemical potential, the effective disorder parameter flows to the strong coupling regime, where the perturbation expansion breaks down and cannot provide a clear answer concerning the fate of superconductivity. When different types of disorder coexist in one system, their strength parameters all flow to strong couplings. In the strong coupling regime, the perturbative renormalization group method becomes invalid, and one needs to employ other methods to treat the disorder effects. We perform a simple gap equation analysis of the impact of random chemical potential on superconductivity by using the Abrikosov-Gorkov diagrammatic approach, and also briefly discuss the possible generalization of this approach.