PHYSICS 242, SPRING 2009 SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

TIME AND LOCATION: Monday and Wednesday, 2:10-3:30 pm, Roessler 158.

We will spend the first five weeks of this course reviewing the fundamentals of superconductivity: Basic properties of a superconductor and how they contrast with a normal metal, London Theory, and BCS theory. In discussing the latter topic we will include a general introduction to second quantization and model Hamiltonians, and solve the BCS Hamiltonian both using the canonical transformation approach as well as the equation of motion method for the Green's function.

In the second five weeks we will go through different classes of superconductors, including the cuprates, heavy fermion systems, MgB2, and the iron-pnictides. The emphasis here will be on key experimental results and on simple theoretical pictures, eg the possibility that exchange of spin fluctuations replaces phonons as the "glue" in the cuprates.

    Problem Set 6

A FEW RESOURCES:

Hahnbidt Rhee

Anthony J. Leggett
    "What DO we know about high Tc?"
P. Monthoux, A.V. Balatsky, D. Pines
    "Weak-Coupling Theory of high-temperature superconductivity in the antiferromagnetically correlated copper oxides"
S.R. White, D.J. Scalapino, R.L. Sugar, N.E. Bickers, and R.T. Scalettar
    "Attractive and Repulsive Pairing Vertices for the 2D Hubbard Model"
C.C. Tsuei etal.
    "Pairing Symmetry and Flux Quantization in a Tricrystal Superconducting Ring of YBa2Cu3O7-d"
M.D. Johannes (Michelle is a former student of Prof. Pickett)
    "Microscopic origin of magnetism and magnetic interactions in ferropnictides"