# Effect of Order-Parameter Suppression on Scattering by Isolated Impurities in Asymmetric Bands

## Abstract

The single-impurity problem in $`d`$-wave superconductors with asymmetric bands is discussed. The effect of local order parameter suppression near the impurity is to shift the quasiparticle resonance. Contrary to previous work \[A. Shnirman et al., Phys. Rev. B 60, 7517 (1999)\] we find that the direction of the shift is not universally towards the strong scattering limit.

There have been many theoretical studies of the local density of states (DOS) near an isolated impurity in a $`d`$-wave superconductor recently. The main conclusions of this body of work are that the $`d`$-wave symmetry of the order parameter (OP) is reflected in the spatial structure of the DOS, and that a pair of quasiparticle resonaces at energies $`\pm \mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ occur within the $`d`$-wave gap. While these conclusions appear to be robust, the detailed structure of the DOS and the magnitude of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ depend sensitively on details of the band structure and impurity potential.

In this work, we show that local suppression of the OP near the impurity acts as an important anomalous scattering potential. With the exception of Refs. , this effect has generally been ignored. In , a relatively simple and physically appealing model of OP suppression was used to study the resonance structure of the 1-impurity scattering T-matrix. It was found that scattering from inhomogeneities in the OP renormalizes the energies $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ towards the unitary limit $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0`$ while leaving qualitative aspects of the resonances unchanged. The authors suggested this as an explanation for the apparent proximity of Zn to the unitary limit in high $`T_c`$ materials. Here, we extend this discussion to the case of asymmetric bands, which have been shown previously to be important in the single impurity problem. Our main conclusion is that the renormalisation of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ is not generally towards the unitary limit, except in the unphysical case of perfectly symmetric bands.

The calculations are based on an exact T-matrix method, described elsewhere. The model consists of a tight-binding lattice with nearest neighbour hopping, nearest neighbour pairing, and a single, point-like-impurity at the origin. The Hamiltonian is:

$``$ $`=`$ $`t{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}c_{i\sigma }^{}c_{j\sigma }+{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}(u_0\delta _{i,0}\mu )n_i`$ (1)   
$`+{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}c_i^{}c_j^{}+\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}^{}c_ic_j`$   
where $`c_{i\sigma }`$ is the annihilation operator for an electron on site $`i`$ with spin $`\sigma `$ and $`n_i`$ is the electron density at site $`i`$. The hopping matrix element $`t`$ is the unit of energy throughout this work. Self-consistent solutions for $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}`$ from the Bogoliubov-deGennes equations show that $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}`$ is suppressed along bonds connected to the impurity site, and regains its homogeneous clean-limit value within a few lattice constants. The inhomogeneous portion of $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}`$ is extracted, and treated as a spatially-extended anomalous scattering potential, additional to the on-site impurity potential. The T-matrix, which relates the scattering states to the eigenstates of the impurity-free system, is found by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equation.

In Fig. 1, the effect of band asymmetry on the spatially-integrated DOS is shown. The controlling parameter is $`\mu `$, with half-filling ($`\mu =0`$) corresponding to a symmetric band. From (a), we see that the OP suppression is a weakly asymmetric function of $`u_0`$ for $`\mu 0`$. Typical quasiparticle resonances are illustrated in (b). For the model parameters chosen, the $`d`$-wave OP is $`\mathrm{\Delta }_d=0.39`$ and the gap edge in the DOS is $`0.5`$. The spectral weight within the resonances at $`\pm \mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ is transferred primarily from the gap edges (not shown). The broadening of the resonances is determined by the background density of states $`\rho _0(\mathrm{\Omega }_0)`$ and specifies the lifetime of a quasiparticle near the impurity before it leaks away through continuum states. The two resonances shown in (b) occur for the same set of model parameters, with and without inclusion of the scattering from the inhomogeneous OP field, and are an instance in which OP suppression drives the resonance away from $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0`$.

We plot the positions of the resonance peaks in Figs. (c)-(e), for different values of $`\mu `$ and $`u_0`$. In (c), the band is symmetric, and the shift of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ is always towards the strong scattering limit, as predicted by . For $`\mu =0.6`$, the bands become asymmetric and two qualitative aspects are changed: the unitary ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0`$) and strong impurity ($`u_0^1=0`$) limits no longer coincide, and the direction of the shift in $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ is nonuniversal. The former effect has been discussed at length in , but the latter effect is new. For bands which are still more asymmetric (eg. $`\mu =1.2`$) an additonal factor becomes important; scatterers which are near the unitary limit may actually have sufficiently small values of $`u_0`$ that the amount of OP suppression is small. Hence, the shift in $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ for $`u_0^1>0.2`$ is quite small.

We have shown that the simple ansatz for nearest-neighbour OP suppression made by  gives a good approximation to both the impurity resonance position and the momentum-space structure of the inhomogeneous OP in a $`d`$-wave superconductor with symmetric bands. Qualitatively different results were obtained for more realistic asymmetric bands. We will report on novel effects of OP suppression in bulk disordered systems elsewhere.