Electrodynamics of superconductors: from Lorentz to Galilei at zero temperature

Luca Salasnich

doi:10.3390/e26010069

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arXiv · 2401.04493

Electrodynamics of superconductors: from Lorentz to Galilei at zero temperature

Luca Salasnich

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Abstract

We discuss the derivation of the electrodynamics of superconductors coupled to the electromagnetic field from a Lorentz-invariant bosonic model of Cooper pairs. Our results are obtained at zero temperature where, according to the third law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the system is zero. In the nonrelativistic limit we obtain a Galilei-invariant superconducting system which differs with respect to the familiar Schr\"odinger-like one. From this point of view, there are similarities with the Pauli equation of fermions which is derived from the Dirac equation in the nonrelativistic limit and has a spin-magnetic field term in contrast with the Schr\"odinger equation. One of the peculiar effects of our model is the decay of a static electric field inside a superconductor exactly with the London penetration length. In addition, our theory predicts a modified D'Alembert equation for the massive electromagnetic field also in the case of nonrelativistic superconducting matter. We emphasize the role of the Nambu-Goldstone phase field which is crucial to obtain the collective modes of the superconducting matter field. In the special case of a nonrelativistic neutral superfluid we find a gapless Bogoliubov-like spectrum, while for the charged superfluid we obtain a dispersion relation that is gapped by the plasma frequency.

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Luca Salasnich. 2024-01-09. Electrodynamics of superconductors: from Lorentz to Galilei at zero temperature. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26010069

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