Effect of disorder on a Pomeranchuk instability

Abstract

We study the effect of disorder on the order parameter equation and transition temperature of a Pomeranchuk-type Fermi-surface instability using replica mean field theory. We consider the example of a phase transition to a $d_{x^2 +y^2}$ type Fermi surface distortion, and show that, in the regime where such a transition is second order, the transition temperature is reduced by disorder in essentially the same way as that for a d-wave superconductor. We argue that observing this disorder dependence of metal-to-metal transition might be a useful indicator of a finite angular momentum Fermi surface distortion.