BCS-BEC CROSSOVER WITHOUT APPEAL TO SCATTERING LENGTH THEORY

Abstract

BCS-BEC (an acronym formed from Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer and Bose–Einstein condensation) crossover physics has customarily been addressed in the framework of the scattering length theory (SLT), which requires regularization/renormalization of equations involving infinities. This paper gives a frame by frame picture, as it were, of the crossover scenario without appealing to SLT. While we believe that the intuitive approach followed here will make the subject accessible to a wider readership, we also show that it sheds light on a feature that has not been under the purview of the customary approach: the role of the hole–hole scatterings vis-à-vis the electron–electron scatterings as one goes from the BCS to the BEC end. More importantly, we show that there are critical values of the concentration (n)and the interaction parameter (λ) at which the condensation of Cooper pairs takes place; this is a finding in contrast with the view that such pairs are automatically condensed.