Microscopic Model of Quasiparticle Wave Packets in Superfluids, Superconductors, and Paired Hall States

S. A. Parameswaran, S. A. Kivelson, R. Shankar, S. L. Sondhi, and B. Z. Spivak

Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 237004 – Published 5 December 2012

Abstract

We study the structure of Bogoliubov quasiparticles, bogolons, the fermionic excitations of paired superfluids that arise from fermion (BCS) pairing, including neutral superfluids, superconductors, and paired quantum Hall states. The naive construction of a stationary quasiparticle in which the deformation of the pair field is neglected leads to a contradiction: it carries a net electrical current even though it does not move. However, treating the pair field self-consistently resolves this problem: in a neutral superfluid, a dipolar current pattern is associated with the quasiparticle for which the total current vanishes. When Maxwell electrodynamics is included, as appropriate to a superconductor, this pattern is confined over a penetration depth. For paired quantum Hall states of composite fermions, the Maxwell term is replaced by a Chern-Simons term, which leads to a dipolar charge distribution and consequently to a dipolar current pattern.

Received 2 May 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.237004

Authors & Affiliations

S. A. Parameswaran^1,*, S. A. Kivelson², R. Shankar³, S. L. Sondhi⁴, and B. Z. Spivak⁵

¹Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
²Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
³Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
⁴Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
⁵Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA