Impurity effects in quasiparticle spectrum of high-Tc superconductors (Review Article)

The revision is made of Green function methods that describe the dynamics of electronic quasiparticles in disordered superconducting systems with d-wave symmetry of order parameter. Various types of impurity perturbations are analyzed within the simplest T-matrix approximation. The extension of the common self-consistent T-matrix approximation (SCTMA) to the so-called group expansions in clusters of interacting impurity centers is discussed and hence the validity criteria for SCTMA are established. A special attention is paid to the formation of impurity resonance states and localized states near the characteristic points of energy spectrum, corresponding to nodal points on the Fermi surface.