Effective action for Superconductors and BCS-Bose crossover

TL;DR

This paper derives a low-energy effective action for superconductors at zero temperature, capturing the BCS-Bose crossover and describing superconductor dynamics via a time-dependent nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative approach that includes density fluctuations and connects the hydrodynamic regime to a nonlinear Schrödinger framework, extending understanding of superconductivity across coupling regimes.

Findings

Effective action incorporating density fluctuations for superconductors.

Derivation of a TDNLS equation describing superconductor dynamics.

Analysis of the BCS-Bose crossover in the attractive Hubbard model.

Abstract

A standard perturbative expansion around the mean-field solution is used to derive the low-energy effective action for superconductors at T=0. Taking into account the density fluctuations at the outset we get the effective action where the density $\rho$ is the conjugated momentum to the phase $\theta$ of the order parameter. In the hydrodynamic regime, the dynamics of the superconductor is described by a time dependent non-linear Schr\"odinger equation (TDNLS) for the field $\Psi(x)=\sqrt{\rho/2} e^{i\theta}$. The evolution of the density fluctuations in the crossover from weak-coupling (BCS) to strong-coupling (Bose condensation of localized pairs) superconductivity is discussed for the attractive Hubbard model. In the bosonic limit, the TDNLS equation reduces to the the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the order parameter, as in the standard description of superfluidity. The conditions under which a phase-only action can be derived in the presence of a long-range interaction to describe the physics of the superconductivity of ``bad metals'' are discussed.