Superconducting Quantum Critical Phenomena

Abstract

When the superconducting transition temperature Tc sufficiently approaches zero, quantum fluctuations are expected to be overwhelmingly amplified around zero temperature so that the mean-field approximation may break down. This implies that quantum critical phenomena may emerge in highly underdoped and overdoped regions, where the transition temperature Tc is sufficiently low. By using Gor’kov’s Green function method, we propose a superconducting quantum critical equation (SQCE) for describing such critical phenomena. For two-dimensional (2D) overdoped materials, SQCE shows that the transition temperature Tc and the zero-temperature superfluid phase stiffness ρs(0) will obey a two-class scaling combined by linear and parabolic parts, which agrees with the existing experimental investigation [I. Božović et al., Dependence of the critical temperature in overdoped copper oxides on superfluid density, Nature 536 (2016) 309–311]. For three-dimensional (3D) overdoped materials, SQCE predicts that the two-class scaling will be replaced by the linear scaling. Furthermore, we show that SQCE can be applied into highly underdoped region by using Anderson’s non-Fermi liquid model.

Keywords

• Quantum critical phenomena
• mean field
• quantum fluctuation
• thermal fluctuation
• renormalization group