New developments in superconductivity, particularly through unexpected and often astonishing forms of superconducting materials, continue to excite the community and stimulate theory. It is now becoming clear that there are two distinct platforms for superconductivity: natural and synthetic materials. The study of these artificial materials has greatly expanded in the last decade or so, with the discoveries of new forms of superfluidity in artificial heterostructures and the exploitation of proximitization. Natural superconductors continue to surprise through the Fe-based pnictides and chalcogenides, and nickelates as well as others. It is the goal of this review to present this two-pronged investigation into superconductors, with a focus on those that we have come to understand belong somewhere between the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regimes. We characterize in detail the nature of this "crossover" superconductivity, which is to be distinguished from crossover superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases. In the process, we address the multiple ways of promoting a system out of the BCS and into the BCS-BEC crossover regime within the context of concrete experimental realizations. These involve natural materials, such as organic conductors, as well as artificial, mostly two-dimensional materials, such as magic-angle twisted bilayer and trilayer graphene, or gate-controlled devices, as well as one-layer and interfacial superconducting films. This work should be viewed as a celebration of BCS theory by showing that even though this theory was initially implemented with the special case of weak correlations in mind, it can in a very natural way be extended to treat the case of these more exotic strongly correlated superconductors.
We investigate the BCS-BEC crossover taking into account an additional three-body interaction, which is essentially the scattering between the Cooper pairs and the newly formed bosons. We show that if the two-body interaction is attractive, the presence of this additional three-body term makes the crossover process a nonreversible one. Starting from a stable Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) state, crossover to BCS can be achieved; but if the BCS state is the starting point, instead of a stable BEC region, what the system crosses over to is a metastable condensed state.
Quantum-size oscillations of the basic physical characteristics of a confined fermionic condensate are a well-known phenomenon. Its conventional understanding is based on the single-particle physics, whereby the oscillations follow the size-dependent changes in the single-particle density of states. Here we present a study of a cigar-shaped ultracold superfluid Fermi gas, which demonstrates an important many-body aspect of the quantum-size effects, overlooked previously. The many-body physics is revealed in the atypical crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to the Bose-…
It is shown that a cluster expansion technique, which is usually applied in the high-temperature regime to calcutate virial coefficients, can be applied to evaluate the superfluid transition temperature of the BCS-BEC crossover à la Lee and Yang. The transition temperature is identified with the emergence of the singularity in the sum of a certain infinite series of cluster functions. In the weak-coupling limit, we reproduce the Thouless criterion and the number equation of Nozières and Schmitt-Rink, and hence the transition temperature of the BCS theory. In the strong-coupling limit, we repro…
We present a stability analysis on a driven-dissipative electron-hole condensate in the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer)-BEC (Bose-Einstein-condensation)-crossover region. Extending the combined BCS-Leggett theory with the generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) to the non-equilibrium case by employing the Keldysh formalism, we show that the pumping-and-decay of carriers causes a depairing effect on excitons. This phenomenon gives rise to an attractive interaction between excitons in the BEC regime, as well as a supercurrent that anomalously flows anti-parallel to $\nabla θ({\bf r})$ (whe…
The pairing of interacting fermions leading to superfluidity has two limiting regimes: the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) scheme for weakly interacting degenerate fermions and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of bosonic pairs of strongly interacting fermions. While the superconductivity that emerges in most metallic systems is the BCS-like electron pairing, strongly correlated electrons with poor Fermi liquidity can condense into the unconventional BEC-like pairs. Quantum spin liquids harbor extraordinary spin correlation free from order and the superconductivity that possibly emerges by …
We observe a long-lived solitary wave in a superfluid Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms after phase-imprinting. Tomographic imaging reveals the excitation to be a solitonic vortex, oriented transverse to the long axis of the cigar-shaped atom cloud. The precessional motion of the vortex is directly observed, and its period is measured as a function of the chemical potential in the BEC-BCS crossover. The long period and the correspondingly large ratio of the inertial to the bare mass of the vortex are in good agreement with estimates based on superfluid hydrodynamics that we derive here using the known…
We investigate the quantum and thermal phase diagram of fermionic polar molecules loaded in a bilayer trapping potential with perpendicular dipole moment. We use both a BCS theory approach that is most realiable at weak-coupling and a strong-coupling approach that considers the two-body bound dimer states with one molecules in each layer as the relevant degree of freedom. The system ground state is a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of dimer bound states in the low density limit and a paired superfluid (BCS) state in the high density limit. At zero temperature, the intralayer repulsion is found …
We present a systematic investigation of the effects of "nonmagnetic" impurities on the $s$-wave BCS-BEC crossover in atomic Fermi gases within a pairing fluctuation theory. Both pairing and impurity scattering $T$-matrices are treated self-consistently at the same time. While the system is less sensitive to impurity scattering in the Born limit, for strong impurity scatterers, both the frequency and the gap function are highly renormalized, leading to significant suppression of the superfluid $T_c$, the order parameter and the superfluid density. We also find the formation of impurity bands a…
Having both elastic and inelastic two-body processes that are characterized by a complex $s$-wave scattering length between $\uparrow$ and $\downarrow$ fermions in mind, here we apply the non-Hermitian extension of the mean-field theory to the BCS-BEC evolution at zero temperature. We construct the phase diagram of the system, where we find a reentrant superfluid (SF) transition that is intervened by a normal and/or a metastable phase as a function of increasing inelasticity. This transition occurs in a large parameter regime away from the unitarity, i.e., both on the BCS and BEC sides of the …
We study thermodynamics of a two-species Feshbach-resonant atomic Fermi gas in a periodic potential, focusing in a deep optical potential where a tight binding model is applicable. We show that for more than half-filled band the gas exhibits a reentrant crossover with decreased detuning (increased attractive interaction), from a paired BCS superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules of holes, back to the BCS superfluid, and finally to a conventional BEC of diatomic molecules. This behavior is associated with the non-monotonic dependence of the chemical potential on detuning and…
The theoretical description of the critical temperature Tc of a Fermi superfluid dates back to the work by Gor'kov and Melik-Barkhudarov (GMB), who addressed it for a weakly-coupled (dilute) superfluid in the BCS (weak-coupling) limit of the BCS-BEC crossover. The point made by GMB was that particle-particle (pairing) excitations, which are responsible for superfluidity to occur below Tc, and particle-hole excitations, which give rise to screening also in a normal system, get effectively disentangled from each other in the BCS limit, thus yielding a reduction by a factor 2.2 of the value of Tc…
We calculate the parameters of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equation of a three-dimensional attractive Fermi gas around the superfluid critical temperature. We compare different levels of approximation throughout the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) regime. We show that the inclusion of Gaussian fluctuations strongly modifies the values of the Ginzburg-Landau parameters approaching the BEC regime of the crossover. We investigate the reliability of the Ginzburg-Landau theory, with fluctuations, studying the behavior of the coherence length and of the critical ro…
By using a Path Integral formalism, we study the fluctuating fields in the order parameter for a 3D uniform Fermi gas at T<Tc. The BCS-BEC crossover condition is included into the analysis in the framework of the usual s-wave scattering approximation. The general expressions for the temperature dependence of the partition function and the quadratic average in the fluctuations fields are explicitly established in terms of the BCS-Gor'kov correlation propagators.
We study the effect of the induced interaction on the superfluid transition temperature of a Fermi gas with a BEC-BCS crossover. The Gorkov-Melik-Barkhudarov theory about the induced interaction is extended from the BCS side to the entire crossover, and the pairing fluctuation is treated in the approach by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink. At unitarity, the induced interaction reduces the transition temperature by about twenty percent. In the BCS limit, the transition temperature is reduced by a factor about 2.22, as found by Gorkov and Melik-Barkhudarov. Our result shows that the effect of the induc…
We review the BCS-BEC crossover in relativistic Fermi systems, including the QCD matter at finite density. In the first part we study the BCS-BEC crossover in a relativistic four-fermion interaction model and show how the relativistic effect affects the BCS-BEC crossover. In the second part, we investigate both two-color QCD at finite baryon density and pion superfluid at finite isospin density, by using an effective Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. We will show how the model describes the weakly interacting diquark and pion condensates at low density and the BEC-BCS crossover at high density.
We present a theoretical study of the ground state of the BCS-BEC crossover in dilute two-dimensional Fermi gases. While the mean-field theory provides a simple and analytical equation of state, the pressure is equal to that of a noninteracting Fermi gas in the entire BCS-BEC crossover, which is not consistent with the features of a weakly interacting Bose condensate in the BEC limit and a weakly interacting Fermi liquid in the BCS limit. The inadequacy of the 2D mean-field theory indicates that the quantum fluctuations are much more pronounced than those in 3D. In this work, we show that the …
We report quantum Monte Carlo evidence of the existence of large gap superfluidity in electron-hole double layers over wide density ranges. The superfluid parameters evolve from normal state to BEC with decreasing density, with the BCS state restricted to a tiny range of densities due to the strong screening of Coulomb interactions, which causes the gap to rapidly become large near the onset of superfluidity. The superfluid properties exhibit similarities to ultracold fermions and iron-based superconductors, suggesting an underlying universal behavior of BCS-BEC crossovers in pairing systems.
We present a theory of superconducting p-n junctions. We consider a 2-band model of doped bulk semiconductors with attractive interactions between the charge carriers and derive the superconducting order parameter, the quasiparticle density of states and the chemical potential as a function of semiconductor gap $Δ_0$ and the doping level $\varepsilon$. We verify previous results for the quantum phase diagram (QPD) for a system with constant density of states in the conduction and valence band, which show BCS-Superconductor to Bose-Einstein-Condensation (BEC) and BEC to Insulator transitions as…
We study the superconducting transition in a two-dimensional electron gas with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We assume low electron density, such that only the majority spin band participates in the transition. We show that the superconducting transition follows either the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), or the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) scenarios, depending on the position of the chemical potential with respect to the bottom of the majority band, and the strength of the Coulomb repulsion between electrons. Hence, the BEC-BCS crossover in this system can be driven either by the cha…
The aim of this Ph.D. thesis was to investigate superconducting properties in the presence of Zeeman magnetic field in systems with local fermion pairing on the lattice. The study also concerned the evolution from the weak coupling (BCS-like) limit to the strong coupling limit of tightly bound local pairs (BEC) with increasing attraction, both in the ground state and at finite temperatures, within the spin-polarized extended Hubbard model. The analysis was also extended to the case of spin dependent hopping integrals (mass imbalance), with special attention paid to the BCS-BEC crossover physic…
We study the subgap Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states in the Richardson's model of a superconductor with a magnetic impurity for different electron pairing strengths from the weak-coupling Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regime to the strong-coupling Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) regime. We observe that the effect of the increasing pairing strength on the YSR excitation spectrum as a function of hybridisation strength and impurity on-site potential is only quantitative and, in fact, rather weak when the results are appropriately rescaled. We furthermore show that the problem is analytically solva…
We present a theory of a two-component atomic Fermi gas with tunable attractive contact interactions on a spherical shell going through the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) - Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover, inspired by the realizations of spherical bubble traps for ultracold atoms in microgravity. The derivation follows the BCS-Leggett theory to obtain the gap and number equations. The BCS-BEC crossover can be induced by tuning the interaction, and the properly normalized gap and chemical potential exhibit universal behavior regardless of the planar or spherical geometry. Neverthele…
The crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superconductivity to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) is difficult to realize in quantum materials because, unlike in ultracold atoms, one cannot tune the pairing interaction. We realize the BCS-BEC crossover in a nearly compensated semimetal Fe$_{1+y}$Se$_x$Te$_{1-x}$ by tuning the Fermi energy, $ε_F$, via chemical doping, which permits us to systematically change $Δ/ ε_F$ from 0.16 to 0.5 were $Δ$ is the superconducting (SC) gap. We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to measure the Fermi energy, the SC gap and characteristic chang…
We discuss the derivation of a low-energy effective field theory of phase (Goldstone) and amplitude (Higgs) modes of the pairing field from a microscopic theory of attractive fermions. The coupled equations for Goldstone and Higgs fields are critically analyzed in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) crossover both in three spatial dimensions and in two spatial dimensions. The crucial role of pair fluctuations is investigated, and the beyond-mean-field Gaussian theory of the BCS-BEC crossover is compared with available experimental data of the two-dimensional u…
We investigate the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state of weakly-bound Cooper pairs to the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) of strongly-bound molecular dimers in a gas of ultracold atoms loaded on a two-dimensional optical lattice. By using the the mean-field BCS equations of the emerging Hubbard model and the concept of off-diagonal-long-range-order for fermions we calculate analytically and numerically the pair binding energy, the energy gap and the condensate fraction of Cooper pairs as a function of interaction strength and filling fractor of atoms in the lattice at zero…
We study the change in condensation energy from a single pair of fermionic atoms to a large number of pairs interacting via the reduced BCS potential. We find that the energy-saving due to correlations decreases when the pair number increases because the number of empty states available for pairing gets smaller ("moth-eaten effect"). However, this decrease dominates the 3D kinetic energy increase of the same amount of noninteracting atoms only when the pair number is a sizeable fraction of the number of states available for pairing. As a result, in BEC-BCS crossover of 3D systems, the condensa…
We investigate the macroscopic quantum tunneling of fermionic superfluids in the two-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover by using an effective tunneling energy which explicitly depends on the condensate fraction and the chemical potential of the system. We compare the mean-field effective tunneling energy with the beyond-mean-field one finding that the mean-field tunneling energy is not reliable in the BEC regime of the crossover. Then we solve the Josephson equations of the population imbalance and the relative phase calculating the frequency of tunneling oscillation both in the linear regime and i…
We study finite-temperature properties of a two-dimensional superfluid made of ultracold alkali-metal atoms in the BCS-BEC crossover. We investigate the region below the critical temperature $T_{BKT}$ of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, where there is quasi-condensation, by analyzing the effects of phase and amplitude fluctuations of the order parameter. In particular, we calculate the superfluid fraction, the sound velocity and the quasi-condensate fraction as a function of the temperature and of the binding energy of fermionic pairs.
This paper presents a comparison of two finite-temperature BCS-Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover theories above the transition temperature: Nozieres Schmitt-Rink (NSR) theory and finite $T$-extended BCS-Leggett theory. The comparison is cast in the form of numerical studies of the behavior of the fermionic spectral function both theoretically and as constrained by (primarily) radio frequency (RF) experiments. Both theories include pair fluctuations and exhibit pseudogap effects, although the nature of this pseudogap is very different. The pseudogap in finite $T$-extended BCS-Leggett t…
We investigate the quench dynamics of strongly coupled superconductors within the time-dependent Gutzwiller approximation from the BCS to the BEC regime and evaluate the out-of-equilibrium transient spectral density and optical conductivity relevant for pump probe experiments. Fourier transformation of the order parameter dynamics reveals a frequency $Ω_J$ which, as in the BCS case, is controlled by the spectral gap. However, we find a crossover from the BCS dynamics to a new strong coupling regime where a characteristic frequency $Ω_U$, associated to double occupancy fluctuations controls the…
We investigate chiral symmetry breaking in a model of Dirac fermions with a complexified coupling constant whose imaginary part represents dissipation. We introduce a chiral chemical potential and observe that for real coupling a relativistic BCS-BEC crossover is realized. We solve the model in the mean-field approximation and construct the phase diagram as a function of the complex coupling. It is found that the dynamical mass increases under dissipation, although the chiral symmetry gets restored if dissipation exceeds a threshold.
We briefly discuss recent experiments on the BCS-BEC crossover with ultracold alkali-metal atoms both in three-dimensional configurations and two-dimensional ones. Then we analyze the quantum-field-theory formalism used to describe an attractive $D$-dimensional Fermi gas taking into account Gaussian fluctuations. Finally, we apply this formalism to obtain a reliable equation of state of the 2D system at low temperaratures in the BEC regime of the crossover by performing a meaningful dimensional regularization of the divergent zero-point energy of collective bosonic excitations.
Multiply quantized vortices in the BCS-to-BEC evolution of p-wave resonant Fermi gases are investigated theoretically. The vortex structure and the low-energy quasiparticle states are discussed, based on the self-consistent calculations of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes and gap equations. We reveal the direct relation between the macroscopic structure of vortices, such as particle densities, and the low-lying quasiparticle state. In addition, the net angular momentum for multiply quantized vortices with a vorticity $κ$ is found to be expressed by a simple equation, which reflects the chirality of th…
We present a numerical study of the one-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover of a spin-imbalanced Fermi gas. The crossover is described by the Bose-Fermi resonance model in a real space representation. Our main interest is in the behavior of the pair correlations, which, in the BCS limit, are of the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov type, while in the BEC limit, a superfluid of diatomic molecules forms that exhibits quasi-condensation at zero momentum. We use the density matrix renormalization group method to compute the phase diagram as a function of the detuning of the molecular level and the polari…
Based on a simple model of a layered superconductor with strong attractive interaction, we find that the separation of the pair-condensation temperature from the pair-formation temperature becomes more remarkable as the interlayer hopping gets smaller. We propose from this result the BCS-BEC crossover induced by the change in dimensionality, for instance, due to insertion of additional insulating layers or application of uniaxial pressure. The emergence of a pseudogap in the electronic density of states, which supports the idea of the dimensionality-induced BCS-BEC crossover, is also verified.
The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) condensation and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) are the two extreme limits of the ground state of the paired fermion systems. We report crossover behavior from the BCS condensation to the BEC realized in the two-dimensional (2D) superconductor, electron doped layered material ZrNCl. The phase diagram, established by simultaneous experiments of resistivity and tunneling spectra under the ionic gating, demonstrates the pseudogap phase at the low doping regime. In the low carrier density limit, $T_{\rm BKT}$ (Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition tem…
