The use of exactly solvable Richardson-Gaudin models to describe the physics of systems with strong pair correlations is reviewed. The article begins with a brief discussion of Richardson's early work, which demonstrated the exact solvability of the pure pairing model, and then shows how that work has evolved recently into a much richer class of exactly solvable models. The Richardson solution leads naturally to an exact analogy between these quantum models and classical electrostatic problems in two dimensions. This analogy is then used to demonstrate formally how BCS theory emerges as the large-
N limit of the pure pairing Hamiltonian. Several applications to problems of relevance to condensed-matter physics, nuclear physics, and the physics of confined systems are considered. Some of the interesting effects that are discussed in the context of these exactly solvable models include (i) the crossover from superconductivity to a fluctuation-dominated regime in small metallic grains; (ii) the role of the nucleon Pauli principle in suppressing the effects of high-spin bosons in interacting boson models of nuclei, and (iii) the possibility of fragmentation in confined boson systems. Interesting insight is also provided into the origin of the superconducting phase transition both in two-dimensional electronic systems and in atomic nuclei, based on the electrostatic image of the corresponding exactly solvable quantum pairing models.
The quantum mechanical concept of quasi-exact solvability is based on the idea of partial algebraizability of spectral problem. This concept cannot be used directly on the systems with infinte number of degrees of freedom. For such systems a new concept based on the partial Bethe ansatz solvability is proposed. In this letter we demonstrate the constructivity of this concept and formulate a simple method for building quasi-exactly solvable field theoretical models on a one-dimensional lattice. The method automatically leads to local models described by Hermitian Hamiltonians.
We first show that the quantum pairing problem can be mapped exactly on to a classical electrostatic problem in two dimensions and then use this analogy to obtain a pictorial representation of how superconductivity arises in a finite fermionic system. Specific application to the nuclei 114–116 Sn suggests some new insight into the evolution of pairing correlations in a quantum system with few active particles. We also summarize other recent work on exactly solvable pairing models, including their applications in a wide variety of strongly correlated quantum systems.