Quasiparticle resonant states induced by a unitary impurity in a<i>d</i>-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 $t\ensuremath{-}J$ 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 ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0};$ (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 ${k}_{F}{\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}.$