Inhomogeneous superconductivity in condensed matter and QCD

By R. Casalbuoni, G. Nardulli. 2003

448 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inhomogeneous superconductivity arises when the species participating in the pairing phenomenon have different Fermi surfaces with a large enough separation. In these conditions it could be more favorable for each of the pairing fermions to stay close to its Fermi surface and, unlike the usual BCS state, for the Cooper pair to have a nonzero total momentum. For this reason, in this state the gap varies in space, the ground state is inhomogeneous, and a crystalline structure might be formed. This situation was considered for the first time by Fulde and Ferrell (1964) and Larkin and Ovchinnikov (1964), after whom the corresponding state is called the LOFF state. The spontaneous breaking of the space symmetries in the vacuum state is a characteristic feature of this phase and is associated with the presence of long-wavelength excitations of zero mass. The situation described here is of interest both in solid-state and in elementary-particle physics, in particular in quantum chromodynamics at high density and low temperature. This review presents the theoretical approach to the LOFF state and its phenomenological applications using the language of the effective field theories.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a8cb258d099be92e2829a615c10e8642d19a1da

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of ultracold atomic Fermi gases (2007, background): “The FFLO state is of interest both in condensed matter physics and in elementary particle physics, even though direct experimental evidences of this phase are still lacking [for recent reviews, see Casalbuoni and Nardulli (2004) and Combescot (2007)].”
Proximity effect in superconductor-ferromagnet heterostructures (2005, methodology): “Cayssol, J., and G. Montambaux, 2004, ”Incomplete Andreev reflection in a clean Superconductor/Ferromagnet/Superconductor junction”, cond-mat/0404215.”
Evidence of Andreev bound states as a hallmark of the FFLO phase in κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu(NCS)2 (2014, background): “1 T1T ∝ 1 T ∫ dεN↑(ε)N↓(ε)f (ε)[1− f (ε)] (1)”
Making, probing and understanding ultracold Fermi gases (2008, background): “This problem emerged from superconductivity in external fields, but also from superfluidity of quarks, where the heavy mass of the strange quark leads to “stressed pairing” due to a shift of the strange quark Fermi energy [94, 95].”
Hybrid Stars that Masquerade as Neutron Stars (2004, background): “…e.g., by including kaoncondensed (Bedaque & Schäfer 2002; Kaplan & Reddy 2002; Kryjevski et al. 2005), crystalline (Alford et al. 2001a; Casalbuoni & Nardulli 2004), mixed (Reddy & Rupak 2005), or gapless (Shovkovy &Huang 2003; Alford et al. 2004) phases or allowing continuous…”
Dislocations and vortices in pair-density-wave superconductors (2008, background): “It is also believed be relevant in cold atoms [7, 8] and in the formation of color superconductivity in high density quark matter [9].”
Ultra-cold polarized Fermi gases (2010, background): “Additional information on the physics of FFLO phases can be found in the complementary reviews [5, 43, 44].”
Comparing and contrasting nuclei and cold atomic gases (2013, background): “When the system is imbalanced, a number of exotic states like the FFLO pairing state (characterized by a oscillating pairing gap parameter) have been predicted (see (Casalbuoni & Nardulli 2004) for a recent review).”
The BCS–BEC crossover: From ultra-cold Fermi gases to nuclear systems (2018, background): “This problem has also been studied in the context of dense quark matter [106, 107].”
Superconducting phases of f -electron compounds (2009, background): “Detailed reviews may be found, e.g, in (Buzdin et al., 1997; Casalbuoni and Nardulli, 2004; Matsuda and Shimahara, 2007); for recent theory see (Houzet and Mineev, 2006, 2007).”