  When non-magnetic impurities are introduced in a d-wave superconductor, both
thermodynamic and spectral properties are strongly affected if the impurity
potential is close to the strong resonance limit. In addition to the scalar
impurity potential, the charge carriers are also spin-orbit coupled to the
impurities. Here it is shown that (i) close to the unitarity limit for the
impurity scattering, the spin-orbit contribution is of the same order of
magnitude than the scalar scattering and cannot be neglected, (ii) the
spin-orbit scattering is pair-breaking and (iii) induces a small id_xy
component to the off-diagonal part of the self-energy.
