Quasiparticle resonant states induced by a unitary impurity in a d-wave superconductor

Abstract

The quasiparticle resonant states around a single nonmagnetic impurity with unitary scattering in a d-wave superconductor is studied by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations based on a t-J model. Both the spatial variation of the order parameter and the local density of states (LDOS) around the impurity have been investigated. We find that (i) a particle-hole symmetric system has a single symmetric zero-energy peak in the LDOS regardless of the size of the superconducting coherence length xi(0); (ii) for the particle-hole asymmetric case, an asymmetric splitting of the zero-energy peak is intrinsic to a system with a small value of k(F)xi(0).