Low Temperature Properties of Anisotropic Superconductors with Kondo Impurities

TL;DR

This paper develops a self-consistent theoretical framework to analyze the low-temperature thermodynamic and transport properties of anisotropic superconductors with Kondo impurities, using large-N slave-boson methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-consistent approach employing large-N slave-boson techniques to study Kondo impurities in anisotropic superconductors, validated against existing methods.

Findings

Good agreement with other methods for T_K > T_c

Calculated low-temperature thermodynamic properties

Analyzed anisotropic states with line and point nodes

Abstract

We present a self-consistent theory of superconductors in the presence of Kondo impurities, using large-$N$ slave-boson methods to treat the impurity dynamics. The technique is tested on the s-wave case and shown to give good results compared to other methods for $T_K > T_c$. We calculate low temperature thermodynamic and transport properties for various superconducting states, including isotropic s-wave and representative anisotropic model states with line and point nodes on the Fermi surface.