Effect of disorder on the resonating-valence-bond model of high-temperature superconductivity: Relationship to experiments

Nonmagnetic disorder is shown to be pair breaking in the resonating-valence-bond model which has been proposed as a theoretical description of the recently discovered high-temperature superconductors. We calculate its effect on the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ and on the excitation gap in the superconducting density of states. We also include a discussion of the large number of recent experiments investigating suppression of $T_c$ and discuss the relevance of the present calculation to these experiments.