Absence of Phase-Fluctuation Contribution to the Low-Frequency Optical Conductivity in d-Wave Superconductors at Zero Temperature

The behavior of the low-frequency optical conductivity _reg() in superconducting cuprates is, at the present, an open and interesting issue. In particular, since the zero-temperature and zero-frequency limit of _reg() attains a value much larger than the universal value expected within a self-consistent T-matrix calculation, an intriguing possibility is that the collective mode can also contribute to _reg(). By taking into account the effect of dissipation on the collective mode in a d-wave superconductor, we evaluate the phase-fluctuation contribution to _reg(0) within the formalism of the phase-only action. We show that even though the collective mode contributes to _reg() at finite frequencies, approaching the zero-temperature and zero-frequency regime the corrections at _reg() due to phase fluctuations vanish.