Theory of disorder-induced increase and degradation of superconducting Tc

Abstract

For a recent strong coupling theory for dirty superconductors, the leading disorder dependence of Tc is calculated exactly within a jellium model, and found to be linear in the resistivity ρ. Due to competition between attractive and repulsive effective electron-electron interactions, dTc/dρ changes sign as a function of the clean-limit temperature Tc0. This explains the experimental fact that low-Tc superconductors show an increase of Tc with disorder, while high-Tc materials show a Tc degradation. Analysis of experiments on many very different materials shows that this correlation is surprisingly well pronounced. Comparison of the model calculation with the experimental results yields satisfactory agreement.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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