Direct observation of the scaling relation between density of states and pairing gap in a dirty superconductor* *Project supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant Nos. 2017YFA0302903, 2016YFA0300602, 2016YFA0300604, and 2016YFJC010282), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11227903, 12004416, and U2032204), the Beijing Municipal Science

Abstract

Theories and experiments on dirty superconductors are complex but important in terms of both theoretical fundamentals and practical applications. These activities are even more challenging when magnetic fields are present because the field distribution, electron density of states, and superconducting pairing potentials become nonuniform. Here, we present tunneling microspectroscopic experiments on NbC single crystals and demonstrate that NbC is a homogeneous dirty superconductor. When applying magnetic fields to the samples, we found that the zero-energy local density of states and the pairing energy gap followed the explicit scaling relation proposed by de Gennes for homogeneous dirty superconductors in high magnetic fields. More significantly, our experimental findings indicate that the validity of the scaling relation extends to magnetic field strengths far below the upper critical field, calling for a new nonperturbative understanding of this fundamental property in dirty superconductors. On the practical side, we used the observed scaling relation to derive a simple and straightforward experimental scheme for estimating the superconducting coherence length of a dirty superconductor in magnetic fields.