Scattering due to non-magnetic disorder in 2D anisotropic d-wave high Tc superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-magnetic impurities affect scattering in 2D anisotropic high Tc superconductors with line nodes, using detailed numerical modeling to understand the impact on the scattering matrix across different regimes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive numerical analysis of the disordered scattering matrix in a realistic 2D anisotropic superconductor, incorporating experimental parameters and visualizing the effects of non-magnetic disorder.

Findings

Non-magnetic disorder significantly alters the elastic scattering matrix.

The anisotropic effects are captured through tight-binding approximation.

The study highlights the importance of the Fermi surface and order parameter in scattering behavior.

Abstract

Inspired by the studies on the influence of transition metal impurities in high Tc superconductors and what is already known about nonmagnetic suppression of Tc in unconventional superconductors, we set out to investigate the behavior of the nonmagnetic disordered elastic scattering for a realistic 2D anisotropic high Tc superconductor with line nodes and a Fermi surface in the tight-binding approximation. For this purpose, we performed a detailed self-consistent 2D numerical study of the disordered averaged scattering matrix with nonmagnetic impurities and a singlet line nodes order parameter, varying the concentration and the strength of the impurities potential in the Born, intermediate and unitary limits. In a high Tc anisotropic superconductor with a tight binding dispersion law averaging over the Fermi surface, including hopping parameters and an order parameter in agreement with experimental data, the tight-binding approximation reflects the anisotropic effects. In this study, we also included a detailed visualization of the behavior of the scattering matrix with different sets of physical parameters involved in the nonmagnetic disorder, which allowed us to model the dressed scattering behavior in different regimes for very low and high energies. With this study, we demonstrate that the scattering elastic matrix is affected by the non-magnetic disorder, as well as the importance of an order parameter and a Fermi surface in agreement with experiments when studying this effect in unconventional superconductors.