Thermal effects in non-Fermi liquid superconductivity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal effects from virtual static bosons influence superconductivity in non-Fermi liquids, revealing a suppression of superconducting instabilities and mapping the phase diagram in two-dimensional systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of thermal effects in non-Fermi liquid superconductivity, extending methods to 2D and identifying their impact on phase transitions and critical points.

Findings

Thermal effects suppress superconducting instabilities in non-Fermi liquids.

The phase diagram includes a quantum critical point and an infinite order transition.

Results are relevant for interpreting experiments on non-Fermi liquids.

Abstract

We revisit the interplay between superconductivity and quantum criticality when thermal effects from virtual static bosons are included. These contributions, which arise from an effective theory compactified on the thermal circle, strongly affect field-theoretic predictions even at small temperatures. We argue that they are ubiquitous in a wide variety of models of non-Fermi liquid behavior, and generically produce a parametric suppression of superconducting instabilities. We apply these ideas to non-Fermi liquids in $d=2$ space dimensions, obtained by coupling a Fermi surface to a Landau-damped soft boson. Extending previous methods developed for $d=3-\epsilon$ dimensions, we determine the dynamics and phase diagram. It features a naked quantum critical point, separated by a continuous infinite order transition from a superconducting phase with strong non-Fermi liquid corrections. We also highlight the relevance of these effects for (numerical) experiments on non-Fermi liquids.