Insensitivity of d-wave pairing to disorder in the high-temperature cuprate superconductors

Using a dynamical cluster quantum Monte Carlo approximation, we investigate the effect of local disorder on the stability of d -wave superconductivity including the effect of electronic correlations in both particle-particle and particle-hole channels. With increasing impurity potential, we find an initial rise of the critical temperature due to an enhancement of antiferromagnetic spin correlations, followed by a decrease of T_c due to scattering from impurity-induced moments and ordinary pair breaking. We discuss the weak initial dependence of T_c on impurity concentration found in comparison to experiments on cuprates.