Fermion number of a Bogoliubov excitation
ID: fermion-number-of-a-bogoliubov-excitation
For a normalized spinless paired ground state , its mean fermion number is . The canonical Bogoliubov quasiparticle creation operator produces , containing exactly one fermion. With BCS coherence factors , the change in mean fermion number is . This need not be an integer because the pairing Hamiltonian preserves fermion parity while failing to conserve the original fermion number operator. Every measurement of that number operator still has integer outcomes.
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