Properties of dirty two-bands superconductors with repulsive interband interaction: normal modes, length scales, vortices and magnetic response

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder-induced frustration in two-band superconductors with repulsive interband interactions leads to novel phenomena like soft modes, vortex clustering, and broken time-reversal symmetry, revealing rich physical properties absent in clean systems.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of normal modes, coherence lengths, and vortex behavior in dirty two-band superconductors with frustrated interactions, highlighting the emergence of soft modes and vortex clustering.

Findings

Soft modes with diverging coherence length at phase transition

Long-range attractive intervortex forces leading to vortex clusters

Characteristic temperature dependence of vortex cluster properties

Abstract

Disorder in two-band superconductors with repulsive interband interaction induces a frustrated competition between the phase-locking preferences of the various potential and kinetic terms. This frustrated interaction can result in the formation of an $s+is$ superconducting state, that breaks the time-reversal symmetry. In this paper we study the normal modes and their associated coherence lengths in such materials. We especially focus on the consequences of the soft modes stemming from the frustration and time-reversal-symmetry breakdown. We find that two-bands superconductors with such impurity-induced frustrated interactions display a rich spectrum of physical properties that are absent in their clean counterparts. It features a mixing of Leggett's and Anderson-Higgs modes, and a soft mode with diverging coherence length at the impurity-induced second order phase transition from $s_{\pm}/s_{++}$ states to the $s+is$ state. Such a soft mode generically results in long-range attractive intervortex forces that can trigger the formation of vortex clusters. We find that, if such clusters are formed, their size and internal flux density have a characteristic temperature dependence that could be probed in muon-spin-rotation experiments. We also comment on the appearance of spontaneous magnetic fields due to spatially varying impurities.