Amplitude, density and current correlations of strongly disordered superconductors

Abstract

We investigate the disorder dependence of the static density, amplitude and current correlations within the attractive Hubbard model supplemented with on-site disorder. It is found that strong disorder favors a decoupling of density and amplitude correlations due to the formation of superconducting islands. This emergent granularity also induces an enhancement of the density correlations on the SC islands whereas amplitude fluctuations are most pronounced in the 'insulating' regions. While density and amplitude correlations are short-ranged at strong disorder we show that current correlations have a long-range tail due to the formation of percolative current paths in agreement with the constant behavior expected from the analysis of one-dimensional models.

17 pages, 19 figures; revised discussion and conclusions section; accepted for Physical Review B