1998/06/30 by Amit Ghosal, Mohit Randeria, Nandini Trivedi · 10 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.81.3940
4 pages, 5 postscript figures, RevTex Final version to appear in PRL; expanded analysis of phase fluctuations and comparison with Quantum Monte Carlo
arxiv created 1998/10/17 · openalex publication_date 1998/11/02 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The effect of nonmagnetic impurities on 2D s-wave superconductors is studied beyond the weak disorder regime. Within the Bogoliubov--de Gennes (BdG) framework, the local pairing amplitude develops a broad distribution with significant weight near zero with increasing disorder. Surprisingly, the density of states continues to show a finite spectral gap. The persistence of the spectral gap at large disorder is shown to arise from the breakup of the system into superconducting ``islands.'' Superfluid density and off-diagonal correlations show a substantial reduction at high disorder. A simple analysis of phase fluctuations about the highly inhomogeneous BdG state is shown to lead to a transition to a nonsuperconducting state.