Self-consistent calculations of the effects of disorder in d-wave and s-wave superconductors

Abstract

The kernel polynomial method, as an approach to deriving highly-accurate spectral properties of large sparse matrices, is extended to investigate the effects of disorder in two-dimensional inhomogeneous superconductors. Being able to solve the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations for quite large square lattices self-consistently, we gain new microscopic insights and make intuitive observations of the localization of low-energy quasiparticles on the nanometer scale. We also compare the behaviors of the optical conductivities of superconductors with different pairing symmetries. We find that the Drude weight turns out to be finite only for the weakly-disordered d-wave superconductor while obvious suppression of the optical conductivity in the infrared range can be observed in the disordered s-wave superconductor.