Interlayer Quasiparticle Transport in the Vortex State of Josephson Coupled Superconductors

Abstract

We calculate the dependence of the interlayer quasiparticle conductivity, $σ_q$, in a Josephson coupled d-wave superconductor on the magnetic field B||c and the temperature T. We consider a clean superconductor with resonant impurity scattering and a dominant coherent interlayer tunneling. When pancake vortices in adjacent layers are weakly correlated at low T the conductivity increases sharply with B before reaching an extended region of slow linear growth, while at high T it initially decreases and then reaches the same linear regime. For correlated pancakes $σ_q$ increases much more strongly with the applied field.