Erosion of nodal Fermi spheres in nonequilibrium d-wave superconductors

M. F. Smith; P. Pairor

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.72.212513

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Erosion of nodal Fermi spheres in nonequilibrium d-wave superconductors

M. F. Smith, P. Pairor

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.72.212513 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

The relaxation of a d-wave superconductor that has been driven out of equilibrium by an optical pulse is investigated. We consider a simple model for the low-energy nonequilibrium state, one in which the unpaired quasiparticles form Fermi spheres near the gap nodes, and calculate the decay rate of the quasiparticle population due to phonon-assisted recombination. In the high density limit for the photoinjected quasiparticles, the decay rate dn∕dt is found to vary as n5∕2, which differs from the n2 form commonly adopted in phenomenological models of the relaxation dynamics. In the low density limit, the decay is exponential. From numerical estimates, we determine that phonon-assisted recombination could play an important role over the picosecond time scales of current interest. We compare our results to pump-probe optical experiments on high TC cuprates and find reasonable agreement for the decay rate in underdoped YBCO for low laser intensity.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

Formula	Reported Tc (K)	Pressure (GPa)	Type
YBCO Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	—	Pressure not reported	unknown
BSCCO Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	—	Pressure not reported	unknown