Abstract One of the important steps leading to the successful formulation of the microscopic theory of superconductivity was the model calculation performed by Cooper (1956) which showed that two electrons, interacting above a filled Fermi sea, had a bound state in the presence of an arbitrarily weak attractive interaction. This chapter first examines Cooper’s calculation. The success of the Cooper model calculation in producing a bound state, with its implication that a proper many-body theory would contain a gap in the excitation spectrum, strongly suggests that the ground state wave function should be constructed from pairs of electrons. However, it is difficult to perform calculations using the many-body pair wave function from Cooper’s model. The chapter then introduces the wave function proposed by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (BCS) as an alternative.
Starting from H. Fröhlich's second-quantized Hamiltonian for a
d-dimensional electron gas in interaction with lattice phonons describing the quantum vibrations of a metal, we present a rigorous mathematical derivation of the superconducting state, following the principles laid out originally in 1957 by J. Bardeen, L. Cooper and J. Schrieffer. As in the series of papers written on the subject in the 90es, of which the present paper is a continuation, the representation of ions as a uniform charge background allows for a
(1+d)-dimensional fermionic quantum-field theoretic reformulation of the model at equilibrium. For simplicity, we restrict in this article to
d=2 dimensions and zero temperature, and disregard effects due to electromagnetic interactions. Under these assumptions, we prove transition from a Fermi liquid state to a superconducting state made up of Cooper pairs of electrons at an energy level
Γϕ∼ℏωDe−π/mλ equal to the mass gap, expressed in terms of the Debye frequency
ωD, electron mass
m and coupling constant
λ. The dynamical
U(1)-symmetry breaking produces at energies lower than the energy gap
Γϕ a Goldstone boson, a non-massive particle described by an effective
(2+1)-dimensional non-linear sigma-model, whose parameters and correlations are computed. The proof relies on a mixture of general concepts and tools (multi-scale cluster expansions, Ward identities), adapted to this quantum many-body problem with its extended infra-red singularity located on the Fermi circle, and a specific
1/N-expansion giving the leading diagrams at intermediate energies. Ladder diagrams are proved to provide the leading behavior in the infra-red limit, in agreement with mean-field theory predictions.
We study a model for high- T c superconductors describing both the strong electronic correlations and a coupling of the carriers to anharmonic phonons. The Projector Quantum Monte Carlo Scheme has been employed to investigate ground state properties. We analyze the superconducting properties of the model by directly addressing to the existence of Off-Diagonal Long Range Order (ODLRO). We review the numerical algorithm and discuss the possibility to observe ODLRO. In the presented model, we find ODLRO pointing towards superconductivity instead of the presence of strong electronic correlations. We discuss several features of the superconducting condensate.
For a strongly interacting boson system, it has been proposed that the concept of off-diagonal long-range ordering (ODLRO) is equivalent to Bose-Einstein condensation for a free boson system. Therefore, the existence of ODLRO in the ground state implies superfluidity. The author checks the validity of this proposition from another point of view. He rigorously shows that, for a hard-core lattice-boson system with a short-ranged interaction ODLRO is suppressed when a charged excitation gap develops and, hence, the boson system becomes a Mott-insulator. Finally, by using his theorem, he shows some interesting properties of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model, which can be taken as a hard-core lattice-boson system.