Impurity Potential Renormalization by Strong Electron Correlation

Abstract

Renormalization of non-magnetic impurity potential by strong electron correlation is investigated in detail. We adopt the t-t'-t"-J model and consider mainly a delta-function impurity potential. The variational Monte Carlo method shows that impurity potential scattering matrix elements between Gutzwiller-projected quasi-particle excited states are as strongly renormalized as the hopping terms. Such renormalization is also seen by the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation with an impurity, where the strong correlation is treated by a Gutzwiller mean-field theory with local Gutzwiller factors and local chemical potentials. Namely, the delta-function potential is effectively weakened and broadened. We emphasize the importance of including the local chemical potential, which is paid little attention to in the literature, by physical consideration of the doping dependence of a local hole density. We also investigate effect of smooth impurity potential variation; the strong correlation yields anticorrelation between the gap energy and the coherence peak height simultaneously with large gap distribution, which is consistent with the experiments.

9 pages, 9 figures, introduction expanded, references changed, Secs.IV slightly modified, typos corrected

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Unconventional disorder effects in correlated superconductors
• Two routes to magnetic order by disorder in underdoped cuprates
• Fate of disorder-induced inhomogeneities in strongly correlated d-wave superconductors
• From immunity to sudden death: Effects of strong disorder in strongly correlated superconductors
• Strong correlations generically protect d-wave superconductivity against disorder
• Disorder-robust phase crystal in high-temperature superconductors stabilized by strong correlations
• Effective pairing theory for strongly correlated d-wave superconductors
• Pinning of stripes by local structural distortions in cuprate high-Tc superconductors
• Mottness-induced healing in strongly correlated superconductors
• Renormalization of transition matrix elements of particle number operators due to strong electron correlation