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Perturbation theory of a superconducting 0-pi impurity quantum phase transition

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2015

Abstract

A single-level quantum dot with Coulomb repulsion attached to two superconducting leads is studied via the perturbation expansion in the interaction strength. We use the Nambu formalism and the standard many-body diagrammatic representation of the impurity Green functions to formulate the Matsubara self-consistent perturbation expansion.

We show that at zero temperature second order of the expansion in its spin-symmetric version yields a nearly perfect agreement with the numerically exact calculations for the position of the 0 - pi phase boundary at which the Andreev bound states reach the Fermi energy as well as for the values of single-particle quantities in the 0-phase. We present results for phase diagrams, level occupation, induced local superconducting gap, Josephson current, and energy of the Andreev bound states with the precision surpassing any ( semi) analytical approaches employed thus far.