2012/05/02 by D. Bucheli, S. Caprara, Bucheli, D. +5
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum many-body systems #Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.0454
9 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2012/05/02 · openalex publication_date 2012/05/02 · arxiv updated 2012/05/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivated by recent experimental data on thin film superconductors and oxide interfaces we propose a random-resistor network apt to describe the occurrence of a metal-superconductor transition in a two-dimensional electron system with disorder on the mesoscopic scale. We explore the interplay between the statistical distribution of local critical temperatures and the occurrence of a lower-dimensional (e.g., fractal-like) structure of a superconducting cluster embedded in the two-dimensional network. The thermal evolution of the resistivity is determined by an exact calculation and, for comparison, a mean-field approach called effective medium theory (EMT). Our calculations reveal the relevance of the distribution of critical temperatures for clusters with low connectivity. In addition, we show that the presence of spatial correlations requires a modification of standard EMT to give qualitative agreement with the exact results.