Secondary Collective Excitations in Intermediate to Strong-Coupling Superconductors

TL;DR

This study reveals the emergence of secondary collective excitations in isotropic superconductors as electron-electron interactions strengthen, extending understanding of amplitude and phase modes across coupling regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to identify and analyze secondary collective modes in superconductors using the iterated equations of motion method.

Findings

Secondary modes appear at energies below the quasiparticle continuum in strong coupling.

Amplitude mode shifts to lower energies with increasing coupling.

Secondary excitations are largely independent of lattice type and Fermi level.

Abstract

Considering systematically derived energy-transfer-dependent effective electron-electron interactions leads to the appearance of secondary phase and amplitude modes in isotropic superconductors in the intermediate-to-strong-coupling regime. We study the implications of such interactions on Bravais lattices by computing the corresponding response functions using the iterated equations of motion (iEoM) approach. In the weak-coupling regime, we find the conventional, primary amplitude and phase modes at $\omega=2\Delta$ and $\omega=0$, respectively. For intermediate coupling, the amplitude mode detaches from the quasiparticle continuum towards lower energies. Increasing the coupling further leads to additional, long-lived secondary collective excitations below the continuum. This phenomenon is largely independent of the underlying lattice and the specific Fermi level. The amplitude and phase modes couple if the system is not particle-hole symmetric. Additionally, we extend the method to compute eigenoperators, i.e., linear combinations of operators that excite each secondary mode specifically. We identify nodal structures in the coefficients for these eigenoperators reminiscent of wave functions in the Hydrogen problem.