Andreev scattering in anisotropic superconductors

Abstract

Three new classes of superconductors have been discovered in the past decade: the organic superconductors, the heavy-fermion superconductors, and the oxide superconductors. All of them show characteristic anomalies that point to the possibility that they are anisotropic superconductors with a directionally dependent (k-dependent) gap function that vanishes in points or lines on the Fermi surface. The problem to identify the symmetry type of an anisotropic superconductor has not found a satisfactory solution yet. Although a number of experiments have been proposed that allow one in principle to distinguish between different symmetry types, most of them are ambiguous because they do not couple to the order parameter directly. Here we propose a new experiment: Andreev scattering, i.e., scattering of low-energy normal quasiparticles off the spatially varying order parameter when the quasiparticles approach a normal-metal–superconductor interface from the normal side.