ASSIGNMENT OF

SOLID STATE PHYSICS-II

SUBMITTED TO: DR. ANEEQA SABAH

SUMBITTED BY: AMMARA ABDUL REHMAN

CLASS: BS-IV-PHYSICS

ROLL NO. 301651004

SEMESTER VIII
SECTION-A

LAHORE COLLEGE FOR WOMEN UNIVERSITY

2 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

BCS theory or Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer theory (named after

John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer) is the first
microscopic theory of superconductivity since Heike Kamerlingh
Onnes’s 1911 discovery. The theory describes superconductivity as
a microscopic effect caused by a condensation of Cooper pairs. Su-
perconductors abruptly lose all resistance to the flow of an electric
current when they are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero.
The theory is also used in nuclear physics to describe the pairing
interaction between nucleons in an atomic nucleus.

It was proposed by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957; they

received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this theory in 1972.

Cooper had discovered that electrons in a superconductor are

grouped in pairs, now called Cooper pairs, and that the motions
of all of the Cooper pairs within a single superconductor are cor-
related; they constitute a system that functions as a single entity.
3 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

This theory explains the phenomenon in which a current of electron

pairs flows without resistance in certain materials at low tempera-
tures. This can happen, so the theory says, when a single negatively
charged electron slightly distorts the lattice of atoms in the super-
conductor, drawing toward it a small excess of positive charge. This
excess, in turn, attracts a second electron. It is this weak, indirect
attraction that binds the electrons together, into a Cooper pair.

Application of an electrical voltage to the superconductor causes all

Cooper pairs to move, constituting a current. When the voltage is
removed, current continues to flow indefinitely because the pairs
encounter no opposition. For the current to stop, all of the Cooper
pairs would have to be halted at the same time, a very unlikely oc-
currence. As a superconductor is warmed, its Cooper pairs separate
into individual electrons, and the material becomes normal, or non-
superconducting.
4 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

Many other aspects of the behaviour of superconductors are ex-

plained by the BCS theory. The theory supplies a means by which
the energy required to separate the Cooper pairs into their individ-
ual electrons can be measured experimentally. The BCS theory also
explains the isotope effect, in which the temperature at which su-
perconductivity appears is reduced if heavier atoms of the elements
making up the material are introduced.

BCS theory starts from the assumption that there is some attraction
between electrons, which can overcome the Coulomb repulsion.

In most materials (in low temperature superconductors), this at-

traction is brought about indirectly by the coupling of electrons to
the crystal lattice (as explained above). However, the results of BCS
theory do not depend on the origin of the attractive interaction.

Extensions of BCS theory exist to describe these other cases, al-

though they are insufficient to completely describe the observed
features of high-temperature superconductivity.

BCS is able to give an approximation for the quantum-mechanical

many-body state of the system of (attractively interacting) electrons
inside the metal. This state is now known as the BCS state. In the
normal state of a metal, electrons move independently, whereas
in the BCS state, they are bound into Cooper pairs by the attractive
interaction.
5 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

BCS theory can be summaraize as follows:

• Evidence of a band gap at the Fermi level (described as “a key

piece in the puzzle”)

The existence of a critical temperature and critical magnetic field

implied a band gap, and suggested a phase transition, but single
electrons are forbidden from condensing to the same energy level
by the Pauli exclusion principle. The site comments that “a drastic
change in conductivity demanded a drastic change in electron be-
havior”. Conceivably, pairs of electrons might perhaps act like bos-
ons instead, which are bound by different condensate rules and do
not have the same limitation.

• Isotope effect on the critical temperature, suggesting lattice

interactions

The Debye frequency of phonons in a lattice is proportional to the

inverse of the square root of the mass of lattice ions. It was shown
that the superconducting transition temperature of mercury indeed
showed the same dependence, by substituting natural mercury
202Hg with a different isotope 198Hg.

• An exponential rise in heat capacity near the critical

temperature for some superconductors

An exponential increase in heat capacity near the critical tempera-

ture also suggests an energy bandgap for the superconducting ma-
terial.
6 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

As superconducting vanadium is warmed toward its critical temper-

ature, its heat capacity increases massively in a very few degrees;
this suggests an energy gap being bridged by thermal energy.

• The lessening of the measured energy gap towards the critical

temperature

This suggests a type of situation where some kind of binding ener-

gy exists but it is gradually weakened as the temperature increas-
es toward the critical temperature. A binding energy suggests two
or more particles or other entities that are bound together in the
superconducting state. This helped to support the idea of bound
particles - specifically electron pairs - and together with the above
helped to paint a general picture of paired electrons and their lat-
tice interactions.

IMPLICATIONS:
BCS derived several important theoretical predictions that are inde-
pendent of the details of the interaction, since the quantitative pre-
dictions mentioned below hold for any sufficiently weak attraction
between the electrons and this last condition is fulfilled for many
low temperature superconductors - the so-called weak-coupling
case. These have been confirmed in numerous experiments:

• The electrons are bound into Cooper pairs, and these pairs are
correlated due to the Pauli exclusion principle for the electrons, from
which they are constructed.
7 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

Therefore, in order to break a pair, one has to change energies of

all other pairs. This means there is an energy gap for single-particle
excitation, unlike in the normal metal (where the state of an electron
can be changed by adding an arbitrarily small amount of energy). This
energy gap is highest at low temperatures but vanishes at the tran-
sition temperature when superconductivity ceases to exist. The BCS
theory gives an expression that shows how the gap grows with the
strength of the attractive interaction and the (normal phase) single
particle density of states at the Fermi level. Furthermore, it describes
how the density of states is changed on entering the superconduct-
ing state, where there are no electronic states any more at the Fermi
level. The energy gap is most directly observed in tunneling experi-
mentS and in reflection of microwaves from superconductors.

BCS theory predicts the dependence of the value of the energy gap
Δ at temperature T on the critical temperature Tc.

• Due to the energy gap, the specific heat of the superconduc-

tor is suppressed strongly (exponentially) at low temperatures,
there being no thermal excitations left. However, before reaching
the transition temperature, the specific heat of the superconductor
becomes even higher than that of the normal conductor (measured
immediately above the transition) and the ratio of these two values
is found to be universally.

• BCS theory correctly predicts the Meissner effect, i.e. the ex-
pulsion of a magnetic field from the superconductor and the varia-
tion of the penetration depth (the extent of the screening currents
flowing below the metal’s surface) with temperature.
8 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

• It also describes the variation of the critical magnetic field

(above which the superconductor can no longer expel the field but
becomes normal conducting) with temperature. BCS theory relates
the value of the critical field at zero temperature to the value of the
transition temperature and the density of states at the Fermi level.
In its simplest form, BCS gives the superconducting transition tem-
perature Tc in terms of the electron-phonon coupling potential V
and the Debye cutoff energy.

• The BCS theory reproduces the isotope effect, which is the ex-
perimental observation that for a given superconducting material,
the critical temperature is inversely proportional to the mass of the
isotope used in the material.

PHOTON-PHONON INTERACTION
Photon-phonon interaction on the analogy of electron-phonon in-
teraction is considered in one-dimensional photonic crystal. ... The
lattice vibration generates the light of frequency which added the in-
tegral multiple of the vibration frequency to that of the incident wave
and also amplifies the incident wave resonantly. On a resonance, the
amplification factor increases very rapidly with the number of layers
increases. Resonance frequencies change with the phases of lattice
vibration.

The photon-phonon coupling serves also as a means of applying

opticalpumping to phonon-phonon interactions.
9 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

With an optical maser as apumping source, it is conceivable that

the selection rules for phonon phonon interactions can be satisfied
between the transverse optical phonons and the acoustical phon-
ons. Thus,the energy of incident photons is transformed to phonon
energy and serves as a pumping source for amplification of a signal
frequency phonon.

The interaction is usually abackward traveling wave type of para-

metric amplification. This kind of interaction is evidently well suited
for parametric amplification or mixing of acoustical phonons near
infrared freqeuncies.

When light and sound simultaneously pass through a medium, the

acoustic phonons of the sound wave scatter the photons of the light
beam. This scattering of light from acoustic modes is called Brillouin
scattering. More specifically, Brillouin light scattering is the nonlin-
ear, inelastic scattering of an incident optical field by thermally or
acoustically excited elastic waves. The nonlinear nature of the scat-
tering is caused by the nonlinearity of the medium, particularly that
part of the linearity expression that is related to acoustic phonons.

This type of scattering occurs when an optical wave in solid or liq-

uid nledium interacts with density variations and diffracts, or changes
its pathThe interaction of acoustic phonons’ and photons observed
in Brillouin scattering is referred to as the acousto-optic effect, a
branch of the photoelastic or optoelastic effects. The acousto-optic
effect allows the controlling of any number of parameters of an op-
tical wave including amplitude, phase, frequency, and polarization.
10 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

When treating Brillouin scattering as a quantum interaction, the

process is considered to be a result of the interaction of photons from
the incident light beam with acoustic or vibrational “quanta” (phon-
on~). The interaction of these photons with the associated phonons
consists of inelastic scatter in which a phonon is either generated in
a Stokes process or annihilated in an anti-Stokes process.
11 BCS THEORY OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

References:
1: PHONON - PHONON CV62 INTERACTION IN CRYSTALS
*THIRD QUARTERLY PROGRESS REPORT I NOVEMBER 1961 - 31
JANUARY 1962

2: “The Interaction of Acoustic Phonons and Photons in the Solid

State” Ian Douglas Winters , Materials Science and Engineering
,University of Tennessee ,Advisor Dr. Thomas
Meek, MSE, Univ. of Tennessee

3: Electron-Lattice Interaction and its Impact on High Tc

Superconductivity, V. Z. Kresin Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory,
University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA,S. A. Wolf

4: “BCS Theory of Superconductivity”. hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.

edu. Retrieved 16 April 2018.

5: Maxwell, Emanuel (1950). “Isotope Effect in the Superconductof

Mercury”. Physical Review. 78 (4):477. Bib-
code:1950PhRv...78..477M. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.78.477.