Enhancing Tc in a composite superconductor/metal bilayer system: A dynamical cluster approximation study

Abstract

It has been proposed that the superconducting transition temperature Tc of an unconventional superconductor with a large pairing scale but strong phase fluctuations can be enhanced by coupling it to a metal. However, the general efficacy of this approach across different parameter regimes remains an open question. Using the dynamical cluster approximation, we study this question in a system composed of an attractive Hubbard layer in the intermediate coupling regime, where the magnitude of the attractive Coulomb interaction |U| is slightly larger than the bandwidth W, hybridized with a noninteracting metallic layer. We find that while the superconducting transition becomes more mean-field-like with increasing interlayer hopping, the superconducting transition temperature Tc exhibits a nonmonotonic dependence on the strength of the hybridization t⊥. This behavior arises from a reduction of the effective pairing interaction in the correlated layer that outcompetes the growth in the intrinsic pair-field susceptibility induced by the coupling to the metallic layer. We find that the largest Tc inferred here for the composite system is comparable to the maximum value currently estimated for the isolated negative-U Hubbard model.

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