  The question of whether spatially inhomogeneous hopping in the two
dimensional Hubbard model can lead to enhancement of superconductivity has been
tackled by a number of authors in the context of the checkerboard Hubbard model
(CHM). We address the effects of disorder on superconducting properties of the
CHM by using exact diagonalization calculations for both potential and hopping
disorder. We characterize the superconducting tendencies of the model by
focusing on the pair binding energy, the spin gap, and d-wave pairing order
parameter. We find that superconducting tendencies, particularly the pair
binding energy, are more robust to disorder when there is inhomogeneous hopping
than for the uniform Hubbard model. We also study all possible staggered
potentials for an eight site CHM cluster and relate the behaviour of these
configurations to the disordered system.
