Electron - Phonon Superconductivity

By F. Marsiglio, J. P. Carbotte. 2001

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A fairly sophisticated description of electron-phonon superconductivity has existed since the early 1960’s, following the work of Eliashberg [1], Nambu [2], Morel and Anderson [3], and Schrieffer et al. [4]. All of this work extended the original ideas of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer [5] on superconductivity, to include dynamical phonon exchange as the root cause of the effective attractive interaction between electrons in a metal. For certain superconducting materials, Eliashberg theory (as this description is generally called) provides a very accurate description of the superconducting state. Nonetheless, as B.T. Matthias was fond of iterating [6], this description was never considered (by him and others) particularly helpful for discovering new, high temperature superconductors [7]. Part of the problem remains that a truly accurate description of the normal state has not been forthcoming. Part of that problem is the “curse” of Fermi Liquid Theory. To the extent that the electron-phonon coupling causes relatively innocuous corrections to most normal state properties, its underlying characteristics remain undetectable (indeed, as will be reviewed here, the characteristics of the electron-phonon interaction are made more apparent in the superconducting state). An exception may be the A15 compounds, whose anomalous normal state properties might help us achieve further understanding of the electron-phonon interaction in these materials [10].

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

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