Abstract
We study the effect of disorder on the superconductor-insulator transition in an inhomogeneous d-wave superconductor using the kernel polynomial method. As the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations of the two-dimensional square lattice are solved self-consistently for the cases with more than 100000 unit cells, it is possible to observe the spatial fluctuations of the super-conducting order parameters at the nanoscale. We find that strong spatial fluctuation of the superconducting order parameters can be introduced by disorder, and some superconducting specific order parameters are even enhanced. Moreover, we find that some isolated superconducting “islands” can survive the strong disorder, giving a boson insulator with some localized Cooper pairs. Our numerical calculations predict the existence of two sequential transitions with the increasing disorder strength: a d-wave to s-wave superconductor transition, and then an s-wave superconductor to insulator transition. The possibility of the appearance of a metallic phase between the superconducting and insulating phases is excluded by performing the lattice-size scaling of the generalized inverse participation ratio. In addition, we also discuss the effect of disorder on the optical conductivity of the d-wave superconductors.
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Sun, J., He, L., Zhao, Y. et al. Disorder driven superconductor-insulator transition in inhomogenous d-wave superconductor. Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron. 59, 617401 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-015-5713-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-015-5713-4