Microscopic derivation of Ginzburg-Landau theory and the BCS critical temperature shift in general external fields (Q6170367)

The authors extend their previous paper [Probab. Math. Phys. 4, No. 1, 1--89 (2023; Zbl 1520.35147)], deriving the Ginzburg-Landau functional from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer free energy functional, in the case of weak and macroscopic external electric and magnetic fields. They consider a system of 3D fermionic particles subject to weak and slowly varying external electromagnetic fields within the framework of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory. They define the magnetic field \(B=h^{2}e_{3}\), which can be written in terms of the vector potential \(A_{B}(x)=\frac{1}{2}B\wedge x\), where \( x\wedge y\) denotes the cross product of the two vectors \(x,y\in \mathbb{R} ^{3}\), as \(B=\mathrm{curl}\,A_{B}\). To the vector potential \(A_{B}\), they associate the magnetic translations \(T(v)f(x)=e^{i\frac{B}{2}-(v\wedge x)}f(x+v)\), \(v\in \mathbb{R}^{3}\), which commute with the magnetic momentum operator \(-i\nabla +A_{B}\). A state is described by a self-adjoint operator \(\Gamma \) on \(L^{2}( \mathbb{R}^{3})\oplus L^{2}(\mathbb{R}^{3})\) which obeys \(0\leq \Gamma \leq 1 \) and is of the form \(\Gamma =\left( \begin{array}{cc} \gamma & \alpha \\ \overline{\alpha } & 1-\gamma \end{array} \right) \). A state \(\Gamma \) is gauge-periodic if \(T(\lambda )\Gamma T(\lambda )^{\ast }=\Gamma \) holds for any \(\lambda \in \Lambda _{h}=\sqrt{ 2\pi }h^{-1}\mathbb{Z}^{3}\), the Bravais lattice with fundamental cell \( Q_{h}=[0,\sqrt{2\pi }h^{-1}]^{3}\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{3}\). A gauge-periodic state is admissible if \(Tr[\gamma +(-i\nabla +A_{B})^{2}\gamma ]<\infty \) holds, where \(Tr[\mathcal{R}]\) denotes the trace per unit volume of an operator \(\mathcal{R}\). For every admissible Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state \(\Gamma \), the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer free energy functional is defined at temperature \(T\geq 0\) by the formula: \(\mathcal{F}_{h,T}^{BCS}(\Gamma )=Tr[((-i\nabla +A_{h})^{2}-\mu +W_{h})\gamma ]-TS(\Gamma )-\frac{1}{ \left\vert Q_{h}\right\vert }\int_{Q_{h}}dX\int_{\mathbb{R} ^{3}}drV(r)\left\vert \alpha (X,r)\right\vert ^{2}\), where \(S(\Gamma )=-Tr[\Gamma \ln (\Gamma )]\) denotes the von Neumann entropy per unit volume and \(\mu \in \mathbb{R}\) is a chemical potential. The Ginzburg-Landau functional is defined as: \(\mathcal{E}_{D}^{GL}(\Psi )=\frac{1}{\left\vert Q\right\vert }\int_{Q}dX\{\Lambda _{0}\left\vert (-i\nabla +2A(X))\Psi (X)\right\vert ^{2}+\Lambda _{1}W(X)\left\vert \Psi (X)\right\vert ^{2}-D\Lambda _{2}\left\vert \Psi (X)\right\vert ^{2}+\Lambda _{3}\left\vert \Psi (X)\right\vert ^{4}\}\), where \(\Lambda _{0}\), \(\Lambda _{2}\), \(\Lambda _{3}>0\), \(\Lambda _{1}\), \(D\in \mathbb{R}\), and \(\Psi \) is a gauge-periodic function in the case \(h=1\). The Ginzburg-Landau energy is defined as: \( E^{GL}(D)=\mathrm{inf}\mathcal{E}_{D}^{GL}(\Psi ):\Psi \in H_{\mathrm{mag}}^{1}(Q)\}\). The first main result proves an asymptotic expansion of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer free energy with respect to the small parameter \( h>0\). For appropriate choices of the coefficients, the authors prove the existence of constants \(C>0\) and \(h_{0}>0\) such that for all \(0<h\leq h_{0}\) : \(\mathcal{F}^{BCS}(h,T_{c}(1-Dh^{2}))=h^{4}E^{GL}(D)+R\), with \(R\) satisfying \(Ch\geq R\geq -Ch^{1/6}\). This main result also gives properties of an approximate minimizer \(\Gamma \) of \(\mathcal{F}_{h,T}^{BCS}\) at \( T=T_{c}(1-Dh^{2})\) and gives an estimate of \(\mathcal{E}_{D,h}^{GL}(\Psi )\). In the second main result, the authors precise the dependence of the critical temperature of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer functional on \(h>0\). For the proofs, the authors introduce a class of Gibbs states with Cooper pair wave functions that admit a product structure of the form \(\alpha ^{\ast }(r)(X)\) to leading order in \(h\), where \(\alpha ^{\ast }\) is a ground state wave function and a gauge periodic function. They prove properties of the Cooper pair wave function and of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer energy of these states.