  Spatial fluctuations of the effective pairing interaction between electrons
in a superconductor induce variations of the order parameter which in turn lead
to significant changes in the density of states. In addition to an overall
reduction of the quasi-particle energy gap, theory suggests that mesoscopic
fluctuations of the impurity potential induce localised tail states below the
mean-field gap edge. Using a field theoretic approach, we elucidate the nature
of the states in the `sub-gap' region. Specifically, we show that these states
are associated with replica symmetry broken instanton solutions of the
mean-field equations.
