Sauter-Schwinger effect in a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superconductor
| Autor: | Solinas, Paolo, Amoretti, Andrea, Giazotto, Francesco |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 117001 (2021) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.117001 |
| Popis: | From the sixties a deep and surprising connection has followed the development of superconductivity and quantum field theory. The Anderson-Higgs mechanism and the similarities between the Dirac and Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations are the most intriguing examples. In this last analogy, the massive Dirac particle is identified with a quasiparticle excitation and the fermion mass energy with the superconducting gap energy. Here we follow further this parallelism and show that it predicts an outstanding phenomenon: the superconducting Schwinger effect (SSE). As in the quantum electrodynamics Schwinger effect, where an electron-positron couple is created from the vacuum by an intense electric field, we show that an electrostatic field can generate two coherent excitations from the superconducting ground-state condensate. Differently from the dissipative thermal excitation, these form a new macroscopically coherent and dissipationless state. We discuss how the superconducting state is weakened by the creation of this kind of excitations. In addition to shed a different light and suggest a method for the experimental verification of the Schwinger effect, our results pave the way to the understanding and exploitation of the interaction between superconductors and electric fields. Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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