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.
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.
Unification of the Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (BCS) and the Bose‐Einstein condensation (BEC) theories is surveyed in terms of a generalized BEC (GBEC) finite‐temperature statistical formalism. A vital distinction is that Cooper pairs (CPs) are true bosons that may suffer a BEC since they obey BE statistics, in contrast with BCS pairs that are “hard‐core bosons” at best. A second crucial ingredient is the explicit presence of hole‐pairs (2h) alongside the usual electron‐pairs (2e). A third critical element (particularly in 2D where ordinary BEC does not occur) is the linear dispersion relation of CPs in leading order in the center‐of‐mass momentum (CMM) power‐series expansion of the CP energy. The GBEC theory reduces in limiting cases to all five continuum (as opposed to “spin”) statistical theories of superconductivity, from BCS on one extreme to the BEC theory on the other, as well as to the BCS‐Bose “crossover” picture and the 1989 Friedberg‐Lee BEC theory. It accounts for 2e‐ and 2h‐CPs in arbitrary proportions while BCS theory can be deduced from the GBEC theory but allows only equal (50%‐50%) BE condensed‐mixtures of both kinds of CPs. As it yields the precise BCS gap equation for all temperatures as well as the precise BCS zero‐temperature condensation energy for all couplings, it suggests that the BCS condensate is a BE condensate of a ternary mixture of kinematically independent unpaired electrons coexisting with equally proportioned weakly‐bound zero‐CMM 2e‐ and 2h‐CPs. Without abandoning the electron‐phonon mechanism in moderately weak coupling, and fortuituously insensitive to the BF interactions, the GBEC theory suffices to reproduce the unusually high values of Tc (in units of the Fermi temperature TF) of 0.01–0.05 empirically found in the so‐called “exotic” superconductors of the Uemura plot, including cuprates, in contrast to the low values of Tc/TF⩽10−3 roughly reproduced by BCS theory for conventional (mostly elemental) superconductors.
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).
Abstract The superfluid density ns(T) n s ( T ) of a superconductor is calculated based on the generalized Bose–Einstein condensation (GBEC) theory that addresses a fully-interacting ternary boson-fermion gas mixture of free electrons as fermions, plus two-electron Cooper pairs (2eCPs) and also, explicitly, two-hole Cooper pairs (2hCPs), both as bosons. Here we consider two special cases (i) 100%–0% (i.e., with no condensed 2hCPs) and (ii) 0%–100% (i.e., with no condensed 2eCPs). Subsumed in GBEC are the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) and Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) theories along with the BCS-BEC crossover theory extended with 2hCPs. We find that in the weak-coupling regime ns(0) n s ( 0 ) agrees with data from the Uemura et al. (2004) graph for several elemental SCs by taking in 3D with a quadratic energy-dispersion relation while in 2D with a linear relation are much too far below the data. In the strong-coupling regime the linear behavior of critical temperature Tc T c vs ns(0) n s ( 0 ) obtained here is just as Božović et al. (2016) found. However, in 2D with a linear relation accounting for 0%–100%, ns(T)/ns(0) n s ( T ) / n s ( 0 ) compares well with some high- Tc T c -cuprate SC data between the two coupling regimes.
In the strong coupling Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) regime the superconductors have two characteristic temperatures: T∗- onset of fermion pairing and Tsc- onset of superconductivity, such that TscTsc. Important consequence is the fact that arbitrary temperature within the interval (Tsc,T∗) is a critical temperature of superconductor transition if an appropriate electric field is applied. This means that if we set the temperature of the system within the above mentioned interval and increase the applied electric field the system undergoes an electric field induced transition to superconductor. We also show the existence of critical value of the applied electric field at which T∗=TscE. This means that although the system is in BEC regime, away from the BCS one, we can apply an electric field that moves the system to a state with TscE=T∗, characteristic of BCS regime. The results indicate that applied electric field experiments are a suitable tool to identify the BEC regime of the superconductors. The experiment can determine T∗ as a temperature below which the electric field Bose condenses the Cooper pairs, while above it the electrons screen the field and it cannot penetrate.
Unification of the BCS and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) theories is surveyed in detail via a generalized BEC (GBEC) finite-temperature statistical formalism. Its major difference with BCS theory is that it can be diagonalized exactly. Under specified conditions it yields the precise BCS gap equation for all temperatures as well as the precise BCS zero-temperature condensation energy for all couplings, thereby suggesting that a BCS condensate is a BE condensate in a ternary mixture of kinematically independent unpaired electrons coexisting with equally proportioned weakly-bound two-electron and two-hole Cooper pairs. Without abandoning the electron-phonon mechanism in moderately weak coupling it suffices, in principle, to reproduce the unusually high values of Tc (in units of the Fermi temperature TF) of 0.01-0.05 empirically reported in the so-called "exotic" superconductors of the Uemura plot, including cuprates, in contrast to the low values of Tc/TF ≤ 10-3 roughly reproduced by BCS theory for conventional (mostly elemental) superconductors. Replacing the characteristic phonon-exchange Debye temperature by a characteristic magnon-exchange one more than twice in size can lead to a simple interaction model associated with spin-fluctuation-mediated pairing.
We argue that the natural variable to establish the crossover from Cooper-pair-based superconductivity to Bose-Einstein condensation of bound-electron pairs is the product kF\ensuremath{\xi} of Fermi electron wave vector times the coherence length for two-electron correlation, and that Cooper-pair-based superconductivity is stable against bosonization down to kF\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\simeq}2\ensuremath{\pi}. We also propose that the experimental plot by Uemura et al., relating the superconducting temperature Tc to the Fermi temperature TF for a variety of ``exotic'' as well as conventional superconductors, can be rationalized by correlating the ratio Tc/TF to kF\ensuremath{\xi}. It appears in this way that the high-Tc superconductors lie in the plot by Uemura et al. near the ``instability'' line kF\ensuremath{\xi}=2\ensuremath{\pi}.