Properties of dirty two-band superconductors with repulsive interband interaction: Normal modes, length scales, vortices, and magnetic response

Abstract

Disorder in two-band superconductors with repulsive interband interaction induces a frustrated competition between the phase-locking preferences of the various potential and kinetic terms. This frustrated interaction can result in the formation of an s+is superconducting state that breaks the time-reversal symmetry. In this paper we study the normal modes and their associated coherence lengths in such materials. We especially focus on the consequences of the soft modes stemming from the frustration and time-reversal symmetry breakdown. We find that two-band superconductors with such impurity-induced frustrated interactions display a rich spectrum of physical properties that are absent in their clean counterparts. It features a mixing of Leggett's and Anderson-Higgs modes, and a soft mode with diverging coherence length at the impurity-induced second-order phase transition from s±/s++ states to the s+is state. Such a soft mode generically results in long-range attractive intervortex forces that can trigger the formation of vortex clusters. We find that, if such clusters are formed, their size and internal flux density have a characteristic temperature dependence that could be probed in muon-spin-rotation experiments. We also comment on the appearance of spontaneous magnetic fields due to spatially varying impurities.