Insensitivity of d-wave pairing to disorder in the high-temperature cuprate superconductors

Kemper A, Doluweera D, Maier T, Jarrell M, Hirschfeld P, Cheng H
Physical Review B 79, 104502 (2009)

Abstract

Using a dynamical cluster quantum Monte Carlo approximation, we investigate the effect of local disorder on the stability of d-wave superconductivity including the effect of electronic correlations in both particle-particle and particle-hole channels. With increasing impurity potential, we find an initial rise of the critical temperature due to an enhancement of antiferromagnetic spin correlations, followed by a decrease of T-c due to scattering from impurity-induced moments and ordinary pair breaking. We discuss the weak initial dependence of T-c on impurity concentration found in comparison to experiments on cuprates.