London Penetration Depth and Pair Breaking

Abstract

The London penetration depth is evaluated for isotropic materials for any transport and pair-breaking Born scattering rates. Besides known results, a number of new features are found. The slope $|dρ/dθ|$ of the normalized superfluid density $ρ=λ^2(0)/λ^2(θ)$ at the transition $θ=T/T_c=1$ has a minimum near the value of the pair-breaking parameter separating gapped and gapless states. The low-$T$ exponentially flat part of $ρ$ for the s-wave materials is suppressed by increasing pair breaking. For strong $T_c $ suppression by magnetic impurities the "Homes scaling" $λ^{-2}(0) \propto σT_c$ with $σ$ being the normal conductivity gives way to $λ^{-2}(0) \propto σT_c^2$. For the d-wave order parameter, the transport and spin-flip Born scattering rates enter the theory only as a sum, in particular, they affect the $T_c$ depression in the same manner. We confirm that the linear low temperature behavior of $ρ$ in a broad range of the combined scattering parameter turns to the $T^2$ behavior only when the critical temperature is suppressed at least by a factor of 3 relative to the clean limit $T_{c0}$. Moreover, in this range, $ρ(θ)$ is only weakly dependent on the scattering parameter, i.e. it is nearly universal.