Title: Critical pairing fluctuations in the normal state of a superconductor: pseudogap and quasi-particle damping,
Abstract: We study the effect of critical pairing fluctuations on the electronic
properties in the normal state of a clean superconductor in three dimensions.
Using a functional renormalization group approach to take the non-Gaussian
nature of critical fluctuations into account, we show microscopically that in
the BCS regime, where the inverse coherence length is much smaller than the
Fermi wavevector, critical pairing fluctuations give rise to a non-analytic
contribution to the quasi-particle damping of order $ T_c \sqrt{Gi} \ln ( 80 /
Gi )$, where the Ginzburg-Levanyuk number $Gi$ is a dimensionless measure for
the width of the critical region. As a consequence, there is a temperature
window above $T_c$ where the quasiparticle damping due to critical pairing
fluctuations can be larger than the usual $T^2$-Fermi liquid damping due to
non-critical scattering processes. On the other hand, in the strong coupling
regime where $Gi$ is of order unity, we find that the quasiparticle damping due
to critical pairing fluctuations is proportional to the temperature. Moreover,
we show that in the vicinity of the critical temperature $T_c$ the electronic
density of states exhibits a fluctuation-induced pseudogap. We also use
functional renormalization group methods to derive and classify various types
of processes induced by the pairing interaction in Fermi systems close to the
superconducting instability.