Superconductivity in Cu-doped Bi$_2$Se$_3$ with potential disorder

Abstract

We study the effects of random nonmagnetic impurities on superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ in a Cu-doped Bi$_2$Se$_3$, for which four types of pair potentials have been proposed. Although all the candidates belong to $s$-wave symmetry, two orbital degree of freedom in electronic structures enriches the symmetry variety of a Cooper pair such as even-orbital-parity and odd-orbital-parity. We consider realistic electronic structures of Cu-doped Bi$_2$Se$_3$ by using tight-binding Hamiltonian on a hexagonal lattice and consider effects of impurity scatterings through the self-energy of the Green's function within the Born approximation. We find that even-orbital-parity spin-singlet superconductivity is basically robust even in the presence of impurities. The degree of the robustness depends on the electronic structures in the normal state and on the pairing symmetry in orbital space. On the other hand, two odd-orbital-parity spin-triplet order parameters are always fragile in the presence of potential disorder.