Fermion Condensation: Theory and Experiment

Abstract

Fundamentals of fermion-condensation physics are outlined. Fermion condensation is a phase transition occurring in a strongly correlated Fermi system upon a topological reconstruction of the Landau ground state and leading to the formation of a fermion condensate that possesses the dispersionless single-particle spectrum $\epsilon({\mathbf{p}})=0$ in the momentum-space region adjacent to the Fermi surface and, accordingly, an anomalously enhanced density of single-particle states. A original method is developed for solving the set of nonlinear integral equations of fermion-condensation theory. This method makes it possible to analyze the problem of quantum chaos in strongly interacting multifermion systems. The computational technique used is demonstrated by applying it to superdense quark–gluon plasma, where the structure of exchange quark–quark interaction is well known. In electron systems featuring a fermion condensate, the magnitude of the gap appearing in the single-particle spectrum owing to Cooper pairing is shown to be much larger than that in Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory. This explains both a high superconducting-transition temperature $T_{c}$ and, with allowance for $C_{4}$ crystal-lattice symmetry, the $D$-wave pairing-gap structure observed in cuprates. It is found that, in addition to the BCS gap $\Delta$, the spectrum of single-particle excitations of superconducting systems where a fermion condensate is present develops a nonsuperconducting gap $\Upsilon$ that owes its existence to the interaction of condensate particles with normal quasiparticles residing outside the condensate region in momentum space. The question of whether these results are pertinent to the two-gap structure recently unearthed in the excitation spectrum of cuprates upon analyzing ARPES data is addressed.