Disorder-dependent slopes of the upper critical field in nodal and nodeless superconductors

TL;DR

This study investigates how disorder affects the slope of the upper critical field near the critical temperature in anisotropic superconductors, revealing distinct behaviors for nodal and nodeless cases that can help identify the order parameter symmetry.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of the disorder dependence of the upper critical field slope in anisotropic superconductors with line nodes, including mixed s+d states, using Ginzburg-Landau theory.

Findings

Line nodes cause the slope to decrease with disorder, unlike nodeless cases.

In pure d-wave, the slope changes from decreasing to increasing at a critical scattering level.

Disorder dependence of the slope can experimentally distinguish nodal from nodeless superconductors.

Abstract

We study the slopes of the upper critical field $\partial_{T}H_{c2}|_{T_{c}}\equiv\partial H_{_{c2}}/\partial T$ at $T_{c}$ in anisotropic superconductors with transport (non-magnetic) scattering employing the Ginzburg-Landau theory, developed for this situation by S. Pokrovsky and V. Pokrovsky, Phys. Rev. B 54, 13275 (1996). We found unexpected behavior of the slopes for a $d-$wave superconductor and in a more general case of materials with line nodes in the order parameter. Specifically, the presence of line nodes causes $\partial_{T}H_{c2}|_{T_{c}}$ to decrease with increasing non-magnetic scattering parameter $P$, unlike the nodeless case where the slope increases. In a pure $d-$wave case, the slope $\partial H_{c2}|_{T_{c}}$ changes from decreasing to increasing when scattering parameter approaches $P\approx0.91\,P_{{\rm crit}}$, where $P_{{\rm crit}}\approx0.2807$ at which $T_{c}\to0$ that implies the the existence of a gapless state in $d-$wave superconductors with transport scattering in the interval, $0.91\,P_{{\rm {crit}}}<P<P_{{\rm crit}}$. Furthermore, we have considered the mixed $s+d$ order parameter that has 4 nodes on a cylindrical Fermi surface when a $d-$part is dominant, or no nodes at all when an $s-$phase is the major one. We find that presence of nodes causes the slope $\partial_{T}H_{c2}|_{T_{c}},$ to decrease initially with increasing $P$, whereas in the nodeless state, $\partial_{T}H_{c2}|_{T_{c}}$ monotonically increases. Therefore, fairly straightforward experiments make it possible to decide whether or not the order parameter of a superconductor has nodes by measuring the disorder-dependence of the slope of $H_{c2}$ at $T_{c}$.