Renormalization of the upper critical field by superconducting fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how superconducting fluctuations influence the upper critical field in disordered thin films, revealing that fluctuations lower the critical field and induce non-perturbative effects, significantly shifting the transition line.

Contribution

It provides explicit calculations of fluctuation corrections and develops a general rule for higher-order diagram analysis, highlighting the non-perturbative nature of the renormalization.

Findings

Superconducting fluctuations lower the upper critical field.

Higher order corrections become more singular with increasing order.

The transition line can be strongly shifted from mean-field predictions.

Abstract

We study the effect of superconducting fluctuations on the upper critical field of a disordered superconducting film at low temperatures. The first order fluctuation correction is found explicitly. In the framework of the perturbative analysis, superconducting fluctuations are shown to shift the upper critical field line toward lower fields and do not lead to an upward curvature. Higher order corrections to the quadratic term coefficient in the Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional are studied. We extract a family of the mostly divergent diagrams and formulate a general rule of calculating a diagram of an arbitrary order. We find that the singularity gets more severe with increasing perturbation theory order. We conclude that the renormalization of the Ginzburg-Landau coefficients by superconducting fluctuations is an essentially non-perturbative effect. As a result, the genuine transition line may be strongly shifted from the classical mean-field curve in a two-dimensional superconductor.