Ultrathin underdoped films of YBa2Cu3O7 d (YBCO) exhibit a prominent and abrupt downturn in ab-plane superfluid density nS(T) at a temperature consistent with a 2D vortex-pair unbinding transition. In this paper, we show that this characteristic feature of 2D superconductors diminishes with increasing film thickness consistent with theory, provided one uses the full film thickness rather than a...

A theoretical study of vesicles of topological genus zero is presented. The bilayer membranes forming the vesicles have various degrees of intrinsic (tangent-plane) orientational order, ranging from smectic to hexatic, frustrated by curvature and topology. The field-theoretical model for these 'n-atic' surfaces has been studied before in the low temperature (mean-field) limit. Work presented he...

To explain the strong quasiparticle damping in the cuprates, Sachdev and collaborators proposed to couple the system to a critically fluctuating id(xy)- or is-order parameter mode. Here we generalize the approach to the presence of static disorder. In the id case, the order parameter dynamics becomes diffusive, but otherwise much of the phenomenology of the clean case remains intact. In contras...

The following is a thermodynamic analysis of a III order (and some aspects of a IV order) phase transition. Such a transition can occur in a superconductor if the normal state is a diamagnet. The equation for a phase boundary in an H–T (H is the magnetic field, T , the temperature) plane is derived. by considering two possible forms of the gradient energy, it is possible to construct a field th...

We introduce Andreev scattering (electron-hole conversion at an interface of a normal conductor to a superconductor) at the outer vertices of a quantum star graph and examine its effect on the spectrum. More specifically we show that the density of states in Andreev graphs is suppressed near the Fermi energy where a spectral gap may occur. The size and existence of such a gap depends on one sid...