We have found the elementary excitations of the exactly solvable BCS model for a fixed number of particles. These turn out to have a peculiar dispersion relation, some of them with no counterpart in the Bogoliubov picture, and unusual counting properties related to an old conjecture made by Gaudin. We give an algorithm to count the number of excitations for each excited state and a graphical interpretation in terms of paths and Young diagrams. For large systems the excitations are described by an effective Gaudin model, which accounts for the finite-size corrections to BCS.

• Received 1 August 2002

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.67.064510