The pair-fluctuation contribution reduces the electrostatic screening length in superconductivity as compared to the normal state. When a conductor possesses a static background charge distribution, superconductivity arises even in the absence of an
explicit pairing interaction, such that the Coulomb repulsion is reduced and the total energy is lowered. We demonstrate that the superconducting gap increases with increased background charge at first, after which the mixing of the Higgs and plasma modes suppresses superconductivity in the pseudogap phase. This indicates that the mechanism may be relevant to the cuprates and iron pnictides. When the background charge is identified with the incoherent component of optical conductivity in the cuprates, our results reproduce the shape, size and position of the superconducting dome with zero free parameters. A superconducting critical temperature of about 1000 K is possible in ion-doped conductors.
We argue that there is a spontaneously broken rotational symmetry between space-time coordinates and gauge theoretical phases. The dilatonic mode acts as the massive Higgs boson, whose vacuum expectation value determines the gauge couplings. This mec
hanism requires that the quadratic divergences, or tadpoles of the three gauge-theory couplings, unify at a certain scale. We verify this statement, and find that this occurs at Lambda_u ~ 4x10^7 GeV. The tadpole cancellation condition, together with the dilaton self-energy, fixes the value of the unified tadpole coefficient to be 1/[4 ln(Lambda_cut/Lambda_u)]. The observed values of the coupling constants at Lambda_u then implies Lambda_cut ~ 4x10^18 GeV, which is close to the value of the reduced Planck mass MR_Pl=M_Pl/sqrt(8 pi)=2.4 x 10^18 GeV. In other words, by assuming a cutoff at M_Pl or MR_Pl, we are able to obtain predictions for the gauge couplings which agree with the true values to within a few percent. It turns out that this symmetry breaking can only take place if mass is generated with the aid of some other means such as electroweak symmetry breaking. Assuming dynamical symmetry breaking originating at MR_Pl, we obtain M_chi ~ 10^9 GeV, which is not unreasonable but somewhat higher than Lambda_u. The cancellation of an anomaly in the dilaton self-energy requires that the number of fermionic generations equals three.
We argue that the general symmetry-breaking pattern in (quasi-)conventional (parity and time-reversal symmetric single-band spin-singlet) superconductivity is given by U(1)_V x U(1)_A -> U(1)_A, where V stands for vector and A stands for axial-vector
, as opposed to the breaking of U(1)_Vequiv U(1)_ele/mag by itself as is commonly thought. This symmetry-breaking pattern implies that there will be a Higgs mode which, together with the Goldstone boson that is absorbed by the photon (Meissner effect), characterize the symmetry-breaking dynamics. We obtain a number of strikingly simple analytical results, which amalgamate the findings of the standard BCS and Ginzburg-Landau theories.
We show that quadratic divergences in top-quark condensation are cancelled when the tadpoles cancel. This latter cancellation is naturally implemented as the cancellation among the top-quark, Goldstone and Higgs contributions. We also calculate the b
osonic correction terms to Gribovs mass formula for the Higgs boson. These reduce the prediction for M_H from 167 GeV to 132 GeV. The tadpole cancellation condition by itself is an independent condition on the mass of the Higgs boson which, in Gribovs U(1)_Y scenario, yields M_H approx 117 GeV with large theoretical uncertainty. More generally, we are able to obtain all three masses, M_W, m_t and M_H, in 100 MeV to 10 TeV energy range as a function of the cut-off scale and the gauge couplings only.
From general considerations of spin-symmetry breaking associated with (anti-)ferromagnetism in metallic systems with Coulomb repulsion, we obtain interesting and simple all-order rules involving the ratios of the densities of states. These are exact
for ferromagnetism under reasonable conditions, and nearly exact for anti-ferromagnetism. In the case of ferromagnetism, the comparison with the available experimental and theoretical numbers yields favourable results.
