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Progress of Theoretical Physics

Electron Pairs in the Theory of Superconductivity

John M. Blatt

Published Mar 1, 1960• 47 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The detailed mathematical correspondence between the Bogoliubov theory and the quasi-chemical equilibrium theory is established by means of identities. The Bogoliubov-BCS Ansatz is a special case of the quasi-chemical equilibrium Ansatz, corresponding to prefect Bose-Einstein condensation of the electron pairs.
DOI
10.1143/ptp.23.447

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By expressing the density matrix, for the special case of one pair state only and simple pairing, in exponential form, we reproduce the results of earlier papers and obtain an expression for the entropy which is formally identical with that of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer and that of Bogoliubov. The expression for the entropy is shown to be exact in the limit of infinite volume. A variational calculation is then performed and the resulting set of equations is identical with that of B.C.S., thus establishing the relation between the Quasi-Chemical Equilibrium, the B.C.S., and the Bogoliubov theories of superconductivity at non-zero temperature.
We review efforts to unify both the Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (BCS) and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) pictures of superconductivity. We have finally achieved this in terms of a "\textit{complete} boson-fermion (BF) model" (CBFM) that reduces in special cases to all the main continuum (as opposed to "spin") statistical theories of superconductivity. Our BF model is "complete" in the sense that not only two-electron (2e) but also two-hole (2h) Cooper pairs (CPs) are allowed in arbitrary proportions. In contrast, BCS-Bogoliubov theory--which can also be considered as the theory of a mixture of kinematically independent electrons, 2e- and 2h-CPs--allows only equal, 50%-50%, mixtures of the two kinds of CPs. This is obvious from the perfect symmetry about μμμ, the electron chemical potential, of the well-known Bogoliubov v2(ε)v^{2}(ε)v2(ε) and u2(ε)u^{2}(ε)u2(ε) coefficients, where εεε is the electron energy. The CBFM is then applied to see: a) whether the BCS model interaction for the electron-phonon dynamical mechanism is sufficient to predict the unusually high values of TcT_{c}Tc​ (in units of the Fermi temperature) of ≃0.01−0.1\simeq 0.01-0.1≃0.01−0.1 exhibited by the so-called ``exotic'' superconductors \cite{Brandow} in both 2D and 3D--relative to the low values of ≲10−3\lesssim 10^{-3}≲10−3 more or less correctly predicted by BCS theory for conventional, elemental superconductors; and b) whether it can at least suggest, if not explain, why "hole superconductors" have higher TcT_{c}Tc​'s.
Chapter 8 deals with the Bogoliubov approach to the BCS problem. This approach is of fundamental interest because it gives a mathematical support to the BCS ansatz, which was simply proposed by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer as a trial wave function. This chapter shows that the BCS ansatz corresponds to the ground-state wave function of the one-body Bogoliubov Hamiltonian constructed from the BCS Hamiltonian. This mathematical support is highly welcome because the BCS ansatz contains the questionable idea that composite bosons condense, like elementary bosons, all into the same state, even if the product of N identical electron pair operators substantially differs from that of N single pair operators when N gets large, owing to the moth-eaten effect induced by the Pauli exclusion principle.
The crucial demonstration that superfluidity was linked to Bose particles and Bose-Einstein condensation came after the discovery of He3 in 1949, which failed to show the characteristic A transition within a reasonable wide temperature interval around the critical temperature for the onset of superfluidity in He4. The idea of the bosonization of electrons due to their pairing, introduced by Ogg (1946) became very attractive as an explanation for superconductivity after Schafroth (1955) showed that a gas of charged bosons with charge 2e would indeed show a Meissner effect, which is one of the most crucial features of superconductors (see Chapter 1). However this phenomenological Bose-gas picture was condemned and later on practically forgotten because it was unable to account quantitatively for the critical parameters of the classical (low-temperature) superconductors. Using for Tc the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature Eq.(l.S) one obtains the utterly meaningless result Tc = lOOOO.R&s; with the atomic density of electron pairs ~ 1022cm~3 and with the effective mass m** = 2me. The failure of the Schafroth picture stems from a very large size £ of pairs in classical superconductors, which can be estimated from the uncertainty principle: The uncertainty of the momentum 8p is estimated from the uncertainty of the kinetic energy 8E ~ vpSp, which should be of the order of Tc, the only characteristic energy of the superconducting state. Therefore and turns out to be more than one micron for simple metals with Tc ~ IK and the Fermi velocity VF — I0scm/s. That means that pairs in classical superconductors overlap strongly and the Shafroth model of real space pairs is wrong. The finally successful theory for classical superconductors was formulated by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (1957). In this chapter we present the main points of the BCS theory, using the Bogoliubov transformation (1947,1958) for the weak-coupling regime and the Green&s;s function technique for the intermediate coupling in Chapter 3. More details will be found in the excellent books by Schrieffer(1965), De Gennes (1989) and Abrikosov, Gor&s;kov and Dzyaloshinskii (1963).
This article gives a detailed review of our current theoretical understanding of the crossover from cooperative Cooper pairing to independent bound-state formation and Bose–Einstein condensation in Fermi systems with increasing attractive interactions. Introduction There are two well-known paradigms for understanding the phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity: (I) BCS theory [1], in which the normal state is a degenerate Fermi liquid that undergoes a pairing instability at a temperature T c ≪ ε f , the degeneracy scale. The formation of Cooper pairs and their condensation (macroscopic occupation of a single quantum state) both occur simultaneously at the transition temperature T c . (II) Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) of bosons at a T c of the order of their degeneracy temperature. At a fundamental level these bosons (for example, 4 He or excitons) are invariably composite objects made up of an even number of fermions. The composite particles form at some very high temperature scale of the order of their dissociation temperature T dissoc , and these “pre-formed” bosons then condense at the BEC T c ≪ T dissoc . In most cases of experimental interest the system under consideration clearly falls into one category or the other. For instance, 3 He is a Fermi superfluid described by (I) whereas 4 He is a Bose superfluid (II). Essentially all cases of superconductivity in metals that we understand reasonably well are much closer to (I) than to (II), as evidenced by the existence of fermionic quasiparticles above T c .