Critical temperature and superfluid density suppression in disordered high-T c cuprate superconductors

that methods traditionally employed to determine the suppression of Tc by impurities are inadequate for the high-Tc cuprates. It has also been suggested that perhaps the effects of disorder on the transition from the rather peculiar and poorly understood normal state cannot be satisfactorily described within the framework of a simple BCS-like mean field theory. 17 In the present article we show that one can, in fact, formulate an adequate description within mean-field theory, if the spatial variations of the order parameter caused by random disorder are accounted for in a fully self-consistent manner. We present a simple argument for the breakdown of the conventional AG-type theory ~which enforces a uniform gap averaged over disorder! in superconductors with very short coherence lengths such as the high-Tc cuprates. This argument is then given substance by numerical calculations within the Bogoliubov‐de Gennes ~BdG! framework, carried