Disorder induced transitions in layered coulomb gases and superconductors

A 3D layered system of charges with logarithmic interaction parallel to the layers and random dipoles is studied via a novel variational method and an energy rationale which reproduces the known phase diagram for a single layer. Increasing interlayer coupling leads to successive transitions in which charge rods correlated in N>1 neighboring layers are nucleated by weaker disorder. For layered superconductors in the limit of only magnetic interlayer coupling, the method predicts and locates a disorder induced defect-unbinding transition in the flux lattice. While N = 1 charges dominate there, N>1 disorder induced defect rods are predicted for multilayer superconductors.     

Thermodynamics of layered strong coupling superconductors

Using the full Eliashberg equations valid for layered compounds, we calculate the effect of various simple anisotropy models on the critical temperature and thermodynamic properties. The changes introduced by the layered structure can be large, but become less significant as the coupling is increased.     

Thermodynamics and phase diagram of high temperature superconductors

Thermodynamic quantities are derived for superconducting and pseudogap regimes by taking into account both amplitude and phase fluctuations of the pairing field. In the normal (pseudogap) state of the underdoped cuprates, two domains have to be distinguished: near the superconducting region, phase correlations are important up to temperature T(phi). Above T(phi), the pseudogap region is determined only by amplitudes, and phases are uncorrelated. Our calculations show excellent quantitative agreement with specific heat and magnetic susceptibility experiments on cuprates. We find that the mean field temperature T0 has a similar doping dependence as the pseudogap temperature T(*), whereas the pseudogap energy scale is given by the average amplitude above T(c).     

Thermodynamics of DNA loops with long-range correlated structural disorder

We study the influence of a structural disorder on the thermodynamical properties of 2D-elastic chains submitted to mechanical/topological constraint as loops. The disorder is introduced via a spontaneous curvature whose distribution along the chain presents either no correlation or long-range correlations (LRC). The equilibrium properties of the one-loop system are derived numerically and analytically for weak disorder. LRC are shown to favor the formation of small loop, larger the LRC, smaller the loop size. We use the mean first passage time formalism to show that the typical short time loop dynamics is superdiffusive in the presence of LRC. Potential biological implications on nucleosome positioning and dynamics in eukaryotic chromatin are discussed.     

Spin-size disorder model for granular superconductors with charging effects

A quantum pseudo-spin model with random spin sizes is introduced to study the effects of charging-energy disorder on the superconducting transition in granular superconducting materials. Charging-energy effects result from the small electrical capacitance of the grains when the Coulomb charging energy is comparable to the Josephson-coupling energy. In the pseudo-spin model, randomness in the spin size is argued to arise from the inhomogeneous grain-size distribution. For a particular bimodal spin-size distribution, the model describes percolating granular superconductors. A mean-field theory is developed to obtain the phase diagram as a function of temperature, average charging energy and disorder.     

Thermodynamics of the superfluid dilute bose gas with disorder

We generalize the Beliaev-Popov diagrammatic technique for the problem of interacting dilute Bose gas with weak disorder. Averaging over disorder is implemented by the replica method. The low-energy asymptotic form of the Green function confirms that the low-energy excitations of the superfluid dirty-boson system are sound waves with velocity renormalized by the disorder and additional dissipation due to the impurity scattering. We find the thermodynamic potential and the superfluid density at any temperature below the superfluid transition temperature (but outside the Ginzburg region) and derive the phase diagram in temperature vs disorder plane.     

Thes-f model with Coulomb repulsion: Thermodynamics of two atomic cluster. Spin 1/2

A cluster of two atoms described by thes-f model with Coulomb repulsion has been considered. The interaction between localized 4f electrons (S=1/2) is taken in the molecular field approximation. The thermodynamic quantities like magnetization, specific heat and correlation functions n , n , S ^z n , S ^z n , S ^z (n –n ), n n and S ⁺ a ⁺ a as functions of temperature are presented for different band fillingN=0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2. The dependence of Curie temperature onN is calculated. The phase diagram forN=1 (T=0K) shows the possibility of existence of two phases: paramagnetic and ferromagnetic.The Curie temperature and the specific heat as functions ofN exhibit similar trends as found in experiments on doped magnetic semiconductors.     

On site coulomb repulsion dominates over the non-local Hartree-Fock exchange in determining the band gap of polymers

The present study deals with the relative performance of the various density functional approaches in evaluating the band gap of polymer materials. Several density functional approximations that includes pure generalized gradient approximated (GGA) functional, meta-GGA, hybrid and range separated hybrid functionals have been used to evaluate the electrical band gap or transport gap of the studied polymers and compared with that obtained using Hubbard U corrected GGA functional (GGA+U). It has been observed that the experimental band gap of the polymers studied is satisfactorily reproducible when GGA+U approach is adopted. The band gap analyses further suggest that range separated hybrid functional, CAM-B3LYP, largely overestimates the band gap of all the polymers studied while the performance of hybrid B3LYP functional and other range separated hybrid functional like HSE is moderate. Better performance of the GGA+U method clearly indicates that short range coulomb correlation plays more significant role over the non-local Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange in determining the electrical band gap of polymer materials. It is also noticeable that the Hubbard U parameter used for the various polymers under consideration is relatively large, indicating the semi-empirical nature of the GGA+U level of calculations. The present finding will help us design new low band gap polymer through estimating band gap by the GGA+U method and this could be very useful for solar cell research.     

Relaxation dynamics in type-II superconductors with point-like and correlated disorder

We employ an elastic line model to investigate the steady-state properties and non-equilibrium relaxation kinetics of magnetic vortex lines in disordered type-II superconductors using Langevin molecular dynamics (LMD). We extract the dependence of the mean vortex line velocity and gyration radius as well as the mean-square displacement in the steady state on the driving current, and measure the vortex density and height autocorrelations in the aging regime. We study samples with either randomly distributed point-like or columnar attractive pinning centers, which allows us to distinguish the complex relaxation features of interacting flux lines subject to extended vs. uncorrelated disorder. Additionally, we find that our new LMD findings match earlier Monte Carlo (MC) simulation data well, verifying that these two microscopically quite distinct simulation methods lead to macroscopically very similar results for non-equilibrium vortex matter.     

Hall effect induced by a spin-polarized current in superconductors

We propose a novel anomalous Hall effect caused by the spin-polarized current in superconductors (SC). The spin-polarized quasiparticles flowing in SC are deflected by spin-orbit scattering to yield a quasiparticle charge imbalance in the transverse direction. Overall charge neutrality gives rise to a compensating change in the number of Cooper pairs. A transverse electric field builds up as opposed to an acceleration of the Cooper pairs, producing the Hall voltage. It is found that the Hall voltages due to the side jump and skew scattering mechanisms have different temperature dependence in the superconducting state. A spin-injection Hall device to generate the ac Josephson effect is proposed.     

Electron localization induced by grain boundary disorder in the normal state of high-Tc superconductors

We have studied the effects of superconducting grain boundary disorder on the normal state transport properties of cuprate films. Dip-coated granular YBa₂Cu₃O_7−y (YBaCuO) thick films on polycrystalline MgO substrates were synthesized and networked grains were systematically made less disordered in order to probe the crossover from strong to weak inter-grain disorder. Grain boundary passivation was achieved by metallic inclusions of different forms. We have shown that the normal state of samples exhibit a semiconducting behavior and changes to ‘metallic’ with sharper transitions to the superconducting state as we reduce grain-interfaces disorder, i.e. increase metallic inclusion content. On the basis of electron localization mechanisms, the normal state conductivity is thus shown to undergo a dimensional crossover from 3D to 2D in the frame of the variable-range hopping (VRH) regime. The transition threshold was found to depend on the form of metallic inclusions.     

Details of disorder matter in 2D d-wave superconductors

Within numerically exact solutions of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, we demonstrate that discrepancies between predicted low-energy quasiparticle properties in disordered 2D d-wave superconductors occur because of the unanticipated importance of disorder model details and normal state particle-hole symmetry. For the realistic case, which is best described by a binary alloy model without particle-hole symmetry, we predict density-of-state suppression below an energy scale which appears to be correlated with the corresponding single impurity resonance.