The electron gas examined in a very thin potential tube exhibits some special kind of the excited pairs making them similar to the Cooper pairs. The coupling energy of the pair can be calculated as an amount of energy required to transform the excitation energy of a coupled pair into the one-electron excitation energy. For an extremely thin potential tube the coupling energy of the pair tends to infinity. The gas energy is unstable with respect to the pair excitation which provides a kind of gap near the Fermi level. A decisive part of the gap energy is due to the electron-electron interaction. The gap is attained on condition the length of a thin potential box exceeds some critical value. In the next step, a coherence length in the gas is obtained. This length, combined with a critical magnetic field representing a transition from a superconducting to a normal state, allows us to calculate the penetration depth of the magnetic field for the singlet and triplet excitations. The penetration depth together with the critical magnetic field and energy gap can provide us with a critical current, as well as critical temperature for the superconducting state.
The electron gas examined in a very thin potential tube exhibits some special kind of the excited pairs making them similar to the Cooper pairs. The coupling energy of the pair can be calculated as an amount of energy required to transform the excitation energy of a coupled pair into the one-electron excitation energy. For an extremely thin potential tube the coupling energy of the pair tends to infinity. The gas energy is unstable with respect to the pair excitation which provides a kind of gap near the Fermi level. A decisive part of the gap energy is due to the electron-electron interaction. The gap is attained on condition the length of a thin potential box exceeds some critical value. In the next step, a coherence length in the gas is obtained. This length, combined with a critical magnetic field representing a transition from a superconducting to a normal state, allows us to calculate the penetration depth of the magnetic field for the singlet and triplet excitations. The penetration depth together with the critical magnetic field and energy gap can provide us with a critical current, as well as critical temperature for the superconducting state.
Relation between the binding energy of a pair of electrons in Cooper's configuration and the magnitude of the attractive interaction between them is investigated theoretically for a two-dimensional electron gas when the electron pair has (a) zero and (b) finite center of mass momentum (CMM) first (i) in the background of a passive Fermi sea and (ii) with inclusion of the effect of Pauli exclusion principle in the presence of an active Fermi sea, at zero temperature. In the Cooper's approach (Cooper 1956 Phys. Rev. 104 1189) two pairing electrons are considered above the Fermi sea. Due to Pauli exclusion principle, these two electrons are forbidden to go into the states whose energies are less than the Fermi energy. Consequently, the role of the electrons which form the Fermi sea is passive in formation of electron pair (Fujita and Godoy 2001 Theory of High Temperature Superconductivity (Kluwer Academic Publishers)). However, in the case of an active Fermi sea, implying possible presence of multiple pairs of electrons coming out of the Fermi sea, the two electrons will have less available region in the momentum space for pair formation due to the Pauli blocking effect. In both the situations, threshold values of attractive interaction are found to exist to bind the electrons having finite CMM even with respect to the Fermi energy while with arbitrarily small value of attractive interaction they can be bound only in the case of zero CMM and that too in the presence of a passive Fermi sea. However, the presence of an active Fermi sea strongly opposes the pair formation having lower CMM. Furthermore, raising the range of the attractive interaction below and above the Fermi surface makes the pair formation more difficult due to enhanced Pauli blocking in this case. In the case of a passive Fermi sea however, with the increase in the range of the attractive interaction it becomes easier for the electron pairs to be in both Cooper pair state (CP) and true bound state (TB). These results are totally distinct from those obtained by Randeria et al (1989 Phys. Rev. Lett. 62 981, 1990 Phys. Rev. B 41 327) that a fermionic bound state in true vacuum is a necessary and sufficient condition for the Cooper pairing instability in the presence of a passive Fermi sea, independent of attractive interaction strength implying that for a potential which is attractive everywhere in two dimension, a two-body bound state exists for an arbitrarily weak attraction. Our calculations show, in the mean field approximation, that co-existence of TB state and CP state with various CMMs can occur only beyond a critical attractive interaction strength. This could lead to the formation of incoherent pairs even under strong coupling situation, which may hint onto the pseudo gap formation leading to some of the exotic features in the anomalous normal state seen in some of the exotic superconductors.
The thermodynamic Bethe-ansatz equations for the one-dimensional Hubbard model with attractive on-site interaction of the electrons are solved numerically at low temperatures. At low temperatures the dominant states consist of spin-paired electrons (Cooper-pair--like) and excitations of such pairs (without breaking up the singlet bound states). A critical field (energy required to depair a Cooper pair) is obtained at T=0 (note that the superconducting Tc=0), which disappears for T\ensuremath{\ne}0. The specific heat is linear in temperature, and the dependence of the coefficient \ensuremath{\gamma} on band filling and magnetic field is discussed. The excitation spectrum shows some analogies with that of resonant valence bonds in two dimensions.
Observed crossover events between different power functions of absolute temperature occurring below about ~1 K in the temperature dependence of the heat capacity or the thermal conductivity of the conventional superconductors are identified as transitions from Maxwell-Boltzmann to Bose-Einstein (BE) statistics of the Cooper-pairs. Because of the low mass of the Cooper pairs of 2me (with me as mass of the electron) and their high density, the BE-condensation temperature, TBE, of the Cooper-pairs is about five orders of magnitude higher than for the dilute alkali atom condensates. The condensation temperature TBE turns out to be proportional to the superconducting transition temperature TSC. From the observed TBE-values it is possible to calculate the density of the Cooper pairs. Assuming that the Cooper pairs form a dense gas of bosons, the diameter of the Cooper-pair orbitals turns out to be equal to the London penetration depth. As a conclusion, due to the large orbital diamagnetism of the Cooper-pairs pairs, only one layer of Cooper-pairs, next to the inner surface of the sample, is sufficient to shield an applied external magnetic field completely.
The superfluid characteristics of the attractive Hubbard model are analyzed for any coupling |U| and arbitrary electron concentration (0n2) by means of the slave-boson mean-field method and also by the perturbative treatment of the strong-coupling limit. The slave boson method takes into account correlations of electrons and yields a reliable description of the crossover from BCS-type superconductivity to local pair (composite bosons) superconductivity with increasing |U|. The results for the ground state (the free energy, the gap in the excitation spectrum) and the electromagnetic characteristics (the critical magnetic field, the London penetration depth, the coherence length) are compared with those obtained by the Hartree-Fock approximation and by the self-consistent second-order perturbation theory in the weak-coupling limit as well as with those obtained using perturbational approaches in the strong-coupling limit. We show that the slave-boson method, in contrast to the Hartree-Fock approximation, gives credible results for all investigated quantities in the whole interaction range, interpolating smoothly between the BCS and local pair regimes. A comparison of theoretical predictions for our simple model with experimental data for various families of short-coherence-length superconductors suggests that the best agreement can be obtained for intermediate values of the local attraction. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
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).
We study a two-dimensional continuum model of a dilute gas of fermions at T=0 interacting via a given two-body potential, with an aim to investigate superconductors with coherence length of the order of the interparticle spacing [kF${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}$\ensuremath{\sim}O(1)], a striking feature of the high-Tc materials. We find that a two-body bound state in vacuum is a necessary and sufficient condition for an s-wave pairing instability. We also find that the existence of such a bound state in a higher-angular-momentum (l>0) channel is not a necessary condition for an l-wave pairing instability. We further investigate using a variational ansatz the evolution from a state with large overlapping Cooper pairs (kF${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}$\ensuremath{\gg}1) to one with Bose condensation of composite bosons (kF${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{0}$\ensuremath{\ll}1). For the s-wave case an exact solution of the variational equations shows a smooth crossover from one regime to the other at T=0. The p-wave solution has a weak singularity when the chemical potential goes through zero, which is the bottom of the band. We show, quite generally, independent of the dimensionality and of model details, that the gap--to--single-particle excitations is nodeless, even if the anisotropic pair wave function has nodes, when the coupling is strong enough that the chemical potential is negative.