Tc suppression and resistivity in cuprates with out of plane defects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how out-of-plane defects affect superconductivity and resistivity in cuprates, revealing that forward scattering impurities cause stronger Tc suppression and deviations from universal behavior.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical explanation for the enhanced Tc suppression by out-of-plane impurities using models of nearly forward scattering potentials.

Findings

Out-of-plane impurities cause stronger Tc suppression than in-plane ones.

Forward scattering explains the observed deviations from Abrikosov-Gor'kov theory.

Significant deviations from universal Tc suppression are expected with realistic impurity potentials.

Abstract

Recent experiments introducing controlled disorder into optimally doped cuprate superconductors by both electron irradiation and chemical substitution have found unusual behavior in the rate of suppression of the critical temperature Tc vs. increase in residual resistivity. We show here that the unexpected discovery that the rate of Tc suppression vs. resistivity is stronger for out-of-plane than for in-plane impurities may be explained by consistent calculation of both Tc and resistivity if the potential scattering is assumed to be nearly forward in nature. For realistic models of impurity potentials, we further show that significant deviations from the universal Abrikosov-Gor'kov Tc suppression behavior may be expected for out of plane impurities.