  Experiments on the irradiation-induced suppression of the critical
temperature in high-Tc superconductors are analyzed within the mean-field
Abrikosov-Gor'kov-like approach. It is shown that the experimental data for
YBa2Cu3O7 single crystals can be quantitatively explained by the pair breaking
effects under the assumption of the combined effect of potential and spin-flip
scattering on the critical temperature and with account for a non-pure d-wave
superconducting order parameter.
