BCS instabilities of electron stars to holographic superconductors
Abstract
We study fermion pairing and condensation towards an ordered state in strongly coupled quantum critical systems with a holographic AdS/CFT dual. On the gravity side this is modeled by a system of charged fermion interacting through a BCS coupling. At finite density such a system has a BCS instability. We combine the relativistic version of mean-field BCS with the semi-classical fluid approximation for the many-body state of fermions. The resulting groundstate is the AdS equivalent of a charged neutron star with a superconducting core. The spectral function of the fermions confirms that the ground state is ordered through the condensation of the pair operator. A natural variant of the BCS star is shown to exist where the gap field couples Stueckelberg-like to the AdS Maxwell field. This enhances the tendency of the system to superconduct.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1404.0571,
title = {BCS instabilities of electron stars to holographic superconductors},
author = {Yan Liu and Koenraad Schalm and Ya-Wen Sun and Jan Zaanen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.0571},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
35 pages, 8 figures; v2, minor change, published version