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Physical Review

Superconductivity of a Charged Ideal Bose Gas

M. R. Schafroth

Published Oct 15, 1955• 366 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is shown that an ideal gas of charged bosons exhibits the essential equilibrium features of a superconductor. The onset of Bose-Einstein condensation marks the transition temperature ${T}_{c}$. Below ${T}_{c}$ a Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect is exhibited which is described in a very good approximation by London's equation.The singular nature of the condensed ideal Bose gas exhibits itself in a space dependence of the London constant $\ensuremath{\lambda}$, determined by the boundary conditions on the wave function. It is shown that the electrostatic repulsion between the bosons compensates this effect and leads to a spatially constant $\ensuremath{\lambda}$, independently of the boundary conditions.The critical field ${H}_{c}(T)$ is determined and found to be related to the penetration depth $d(T)$ by ${H}_{c}=\frac{\ensuremath{\hbar}c}{2e{d}^{2}}$ ($e$ being the boson charge).The $B(H)$ law is different from the one usually assumed for actual superconductors. Corresponding changes occur in the thermodynamical relation.A comparison with superconducting metals is made. The main conclusion is that if superconductivity in metals is due to the concurrence of bosons, then the number of these bosons must be strongly temperaturedependent below ${T}_{c}$.

DOI
10.1103/physrev.100.463

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It is shown that an ideal gas of charged bosons exhibits the essential equilibrium features of a superconductor. The onset of Bose-Einstein condensation marks the transition temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​. Below Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ a Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect is exhibited which is described in a very good approximation by London's equation.The singular nature of the condensed ideal Bose gas exhibits itself in a space dependence of the London constant \ensuremathλ\ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremathλ, determined by the boundary conditions on the wave function. It is shown that the electrostatic repulsion between the bosons compensates this effect and leads to a spatially constant \ensuremathλ\ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremathλ, independently of the boundary conditions.The critical field Hc(T){H}_{c}(T)Hc​(T) is determined and found to be related to the penetration depth d(T)d(T)d(T) by Hc=\ensuremathℏc2ed2{H}_{c}=\frac{\ensuremath{\hbar}c}{2e{d}^{2}}Hc​=2ed2\ensuremathℏc​ (eee being the boson charge).The B(H)B(H)B(H) law is different from the one usually assumed for actual superconductors. Corresponding changes occur in the thermodynamical relation.A comparison with superconducting metals is made. The main conclusion is that if superconductivity in metals is due to the concurrence of bosons, then the number of these bosons must be strongly temperaturedependent below Tc{T}_{c}Tc​.
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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).
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The question of whether the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a necessary condition of the Meissner effect is examined. The electromagnetic susceptibility of a charged Bose gas with short-range repulsion is studied using the perturbation theory with respect to the repulsive force. With decreasing temperature, the Bose-statistical coherence grows, and prior to the BEC phase the susceptibility shows a singularity implying the Meissner effect. This means that the BEC is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition of the Meissner effect in the charged Bose gas with short-range repulsion.