Disorder effects on superconducting tendencies in the checkerboard Hubbard model

Abstract: The question of whether spatially inhomogeneous hopping in the two dimensional Hubbard model can lead to enhancement of superconductivity has been tackled by a number of authors in the context of the checkerboard Hubbard model (CHM). We address the effects of disorder on superconducting properties of the CHM by using exact diagonalization calculations for both potential and hopping disorder. We characterize the superconducting tendencies of the model by focusing on the pair binding energy, the spin gap, and d-wave pairing order parameter. We find that superconducting tendencies, particularly the pair binding energy, are more robust to disorder when there is inhomogeneous hopping than for the uniform Hubbard model. We also study all possible staggered potentials for an eight site CHM cluster and relate the behaviour of these configurations to the disordered system.