A Microscopic Approach to Superfluidity and Superconductivity

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This lecture describes certain properties of interacting Bose gases and superconductors which have recently been considered at Harvard. It is a brief resumé of work by the lecturer, P.C. Hohenberg, A. Fetter, R. Lange, and C. De Dominicis, which will be reported in mathematical detail elsewhere. It concerns attempts to derive from fundamental principles, several aspects of the macroscopic two‐fluid model of London, Landau, and Tisza, the Landau phonon spectrum for bosons, and the structured condensate envisaged by Onsager and Feynman. The lecture describes new results which have been obtained concerning: (1) methods for calculating properties of large, but not necessarily infinite, condensed systems at finite temperatures; (2) methods for performing calculations in boson systems consistent with current conservation and sum rules; (3) results obtained by these methods for the phonon spectrum; (4) more accurate results for the less physical single‐particle spectrum at finite temperatures; (5) results obtained for the macroscopically structured condensate in rotating systems which agree with the macroscopically inferred results of Feynman and Onsager; (6) results which treat depletion of the condensate as a result of interaction consistently and verify that nonetheless, the superfluid density, as operationally determined, is not correspondingly depleted; (7) methods in which the entropy plays a central role, for casting the macroscopic theory in a form which lays stress on the renormalized excitations of renormalized interactions; (8) the almost identical features of the mathematics for condensed Fermi and Bose systems; (9) a restatement, in this microscopic transcription, of the Feynman‐Onsager argument for flux and vorticity quantization.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: