Impurity effects on thed-wave state of the pair tunneling mechanism for high-Tcsuperconductors

Abstract

We consider the impurity effects on the d-wave state in Anderson{close_quote}s interlayer pair tunneling (IPT) mechanism for high-T{sub c} superconductors. We found that the change of density of states and the T{sub c} suppression with impurities are qualitatively the same as the conventional BCS-type d-wave theory despite different gap equations. In particular, for the T{sub c} suppression with the in-plane impurities we solve the T{sub c} equation of the IPT mechanism explicitly including strong inelastic scattering [{Sigma}{sup {double_prime}}{approximately}{alpha}({h_bar}w+{pi}k{sub B}T)]. As expected, the effect of impurities for the T{sub c} suppression is strongly reduced by inelastic scattering and the results can fit most of the experimental data by varying the impurity scattering strength. The insensitivity of T{sub c} with the out-of-plane rare-earth impurities is shown to be consistent with the IPT mechanism. {copyright} {ital 1998} {ital The American Physical Society}