Controllable suppression of the unconventional superconductivity in bulk and thin-film Sr₂RuO₄ via high-energy electron irradiation

In bulk Sr₂RuO₄, the strong sensitivity of the superconducting transition temperature Tc to nonmagnetic impurities provides robust evidence for a superconducting order parameter that changes sign around the Fermi surface. In superconducting epitaxial thin-film Sr₂RuO₄, the relationship between Tc and the residual resistivity ρ₀, which in bulk samples is taken to be a proxy for the low-temperature elastic scattering rate, is far less clear. Using high-energy electron irradiation to controllably introduce point disorder into bulk single-crystal and thin-film Sr₂RuO₄, we show that Tc is suppressed in both systems at nearly identical rates. This suggests that part of ρ₀ in films comes from defects that do not contribute to superconducting pairbreaking, and establishes a quantitative link between the superconductivity of bulk and thin-film samples.