Effect of Nonmagnetic Impurity in Nearly Antiferromagnetic Fermi Liquid: Magnetic Correlations and Transport Phenomena

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonmagnetic impurities affect electronic states, magnetic correlations, and transport in nearly antiferromagnetic metals like high-Tc superconductors using an advanced Hubbard model approach.

Contribution

It introduces the GV^I-FLEX method to analyze impurity effects, revealing enhanced susceptibilities, suppressed quasiparticle lifetimes, and impurity-induced resistivity behaviors near quantum critical points.

Findings

Impurities cause strong local and staggered susceptibility enhancements.

Quasiparticle lifetime and local DOS are suppressed around impurities, creating a Swiss cheese-like effect.

A small impurity concentration can induce a Kondo-like resistivity upturn near the AF quantum critical point.

Abstract

In nearly antiferromagnetic (AF) metals such as high-Tc superconductors (HTSC's), a single nonmagnetic impurity frequently causes nontrivial widespread change of the electronic states. To elucidate this long-standing issue, we study a Hubbard model with a strong onsite impurity potential based on an improved fluctuation-exchange (FLEX) approximation, which we call the GV^I-FLEX method. This model corresponds to the HTSC with dilute nonmagnetic impurity concentration. We find that (i) both local and staggered susceptibilities are strongly enhanced around the impurity. By this reason, (ii) the quasiparticle lifetime as well as the local density of states (DOS) are strongly suppressed in a wide area around the impurity (like a Swiss cheese hole), which causes the ``huge residual resistivity'' beyond the s-wave unitary scattering limit. We stress that the excess quasiparticle damping rate caused by impurities has strong momentum-dependence due to non-s-wave scatterings induced by many-body effects, so the structure of the ``hot spot/cold spot'' in the host system persists against impurity doping. This result could be examined by the ARPES measurements. In addition, (iii) only a few percent of impurities can causes a ``Kondo-like'' upturn of resistivity ($d\rho/dT<0$) at low temperatures when the system is very close to the AF quantum critical point (QCP). The results (i)-(iii) obtained in the present study, which cannot be derived by the simple FLEX approximation, naturally explains the main impurity effects in HTSC's. We also discuss the impurity effect in heavy fermion systems and organic superconductors.