Condensation of fermion pairs in a domain (Q526960)

The main contribution consists in the demonstration of the non-trivial effect of boundary conditions on the effective macroscopic Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) theory, considering a fermion gas at zero temperature and low density, interacting via a macroscopic two-body potential admitting the bound state. The above result is in some contrast to de Gennes' arguments at positive temperature and positive density. The paper starts from low-density BCS theory with Dirichlet boundary conditions and it is shown that the effective macroscopic GP theory also has Dirichlet boundary conditions. While the center of the mass variable \((x+y)/2\) and the relative variable \(x-y\) do not decouple due to the boundary conditions, it is shown that up to a first subleading order as \(h\to 0\), the ground state energy of the two-body Schrödinger operator in the linear case can be computed in a decoupled manner. Here, the small parameter \(h>0\) is the ratio between the microscopic and macroscopic length scales. So, one can separately minimize (i) the relative variable without boundary conditions and (ii) the center of the mass variable with Dirichlet boundary conditions and confine the results to obtain the leading and subleading terms in the asymptotics for the ground state energy of the two-body Schrödinger operator as \(h\to 0\). The first main result consists in that, by the monotonicity of the chemical potential \(\mu\) for every fixed \(h>0\), there exists a unique critical chemical potential \(\mu^\ast(h)\) such that there exists a fermion pair if \(\mu>\mu^\ast(h)\). To the lowest order in \(h\), \(\mu^\ast(h)\) is just one-half of the binding energy of a fermion pair. The subleading correction term is the ground state energy of an explicit Dirichlet eigenvalue problem on \(\Omega\) (the linearization of the GP theory). It is expected that for \(\mu\) above and close to \(\mu^\ast(h)\), the fermion pairs look like bosons to each other and at zero temperature the pairs form a Bose-Einstein condensate, described by the GP theory. The second main result consists in deriving an effective macroscopic GP theory of fermion pairs from the BCS model. The resulting GP theory also has Dirichlet boundary conditions. It is shown that the boundary conditions make a significant difference on the (macroscopic) GP scale, a physically non-trivial fact. The results hold for the rather general class of bounded Lipschitz domains.