paper

Impurity-induced subgap states in superconductors with inhomogeneous pairing

arXiv:2110.05288 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.100.094507

Abstract

We study subgap states induced by a single impurity in an s-wave superconductor with suppressed pairing. For concreteness, we consider a bulk superconductor containing a normal spherical region. We find that a point impurity in this system induces two Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states inside the minigap instead of one, which one would have in a homogeneous superconductor. Moreover, the subgap states appear even if the impurity is nonmagnetic. We prove that this result actually holds almost for any superconductor with a real and spatially inhomogeneous order parameter, if the quasiparticle spectrum is gapped.

20 pages, 6 figures

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