For with positive , expand about as . The real and imaginary equations become and . Plane waves give a gapped radial amplitude branch and a gapless tangential phase branch. This second-order model has two independent real mode coordinates, unlike density-phase conjugacy in first-order dynamics.
On the physical density-phase contour put . Direct differentiation givesIntegrating the Laplacian by parts with the stated bulk boundary convention, and dropping the periodic total derivative of , produces the density-phase action of a Bose gas,Write and , where is constant. To quadratic order,The uniform static density fluctuation has positive curvature . Its inverse static susceptibility at wavevector is , which remains nonzero at . This is the sense in which the amplitude or density fluctuation is massive. The phase has no term proportional to without derivatives; a uniform phase rotation costs no action. It is the massless direction required by global symmetry.
The term shows density-phase conjugacy. It is important to distinguish static density stiffness versus an excitation gap: the density and phase do not form two independent normal-mode branches with one gapped and one gapless particle. In this nonrelativistic first-order theory they supply the conjugate variables of one positive Bogoliubov branch, derived below. The omitted cubic terms include and corrections from the density-gradient denominator.
There is also a background term . It vanishes for smooth fluctuations with zero temporal winding. Periodicity of , however, permits . The compact phase winding term must be retained when such sectors are included; it is not generally the same constant in all sectors. The local Gaussian phonon calculation concerns the smooth zero-winding sector and does not describe vortices or points where the density vanishes.
A complex order parameter captures both the amplitude and phase rigidity of a superfluid. A local isotropic Ginzburg-Landau theory writes its free-energy functional, to fourth order in amplitude and second order in gradients, asThe uniform minimum has for and for . Its phase remains arbitrary under a global transformation. Minimizing with respect to gives . The phenomenological description specifies the allowed structures and coefficients; microscopic input is needed to identify the normalization of and calculate those coefficients. A static functional by itself does not fix the dynamical equation or mode frequencies.
For a dilute three-dimensional Bose gas with short-range repulsion and particle mass , the microscopic low-energy Hamiltonian isThe interaction parameter is expressed through the low-energy s-wave scattering length , rather than an unrenormalized bare delta potential. In a symmetry-selected description, and is condensate density. Equivalently, fixed-number off-diagonal long-range order identifies the macroscopically occupied natural orbital and its amplitude without a nonzero one-point expectation.
Evaluating in a coherent-field condensate variational state gives the Ginzburg-Landau functional of a dilute Bose gas, with the mean-field microscopic identificationsIts stationary variational equation is the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. The time-dependent variational action additionally contains , givingThis term expresses density-phase conjugacy. It is the missing microscopic dynamical input; a purely dissipative relaxation law would describe a different approximation.
Bogoliubov theory writes and retains quadratic fluctuations. In a uniform condensate, and the fluctuation matrix isIts eigenvalues are . The positive branch is the gapless sound mode, continuously crossing over to particle-like excitations at larger . The same result follows by linearizing the time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation about its uniform solution. Thus the microscopic condensate amplitude, scattering interaction and mass determine the mean-field static coefficients and the collective mode. Quadratic quantum fluctuations also produce quantum depletion of a Bose condensate, which a pure coherent-state product omits.
These identifications are controlled for a dilute weakly interacting gas away from a fluctuation-dominated critical region. They are not a universal statement that the exact finite-temperature GL coefficient is always or that its quartic coefficient never receives corrections. Integrating out noncondensed and short-wavelength modes produces effective temperature-dependent coefficients and can change their near-critical behavior. The phase rigidity described by and the thermodynamic order-parameter expansion remain the shared organizing structure.
For BCS theory, the microscopic order parameter is instead an anomalous pair amplitude, commonly normalized as an energy gap . It is not an ordinary single-electron field expectation or automatically the square root of a pair number density. Integrating out fermions and expanding in small and slow gradients near gives the microscopic derivation of Ginzburg-Landau theory. The BCS pairing-field effective action supplies its coefficients through normal-state pair-response functions and thermal fermion sums.
For example, a clean isotropic three-dimensional weak-coupling s-wave model, with the density of states per spin at the Fermi energy and measured in energy units, giveswith microscopic Ginzburg-Landau coefficients from BCS theoryThe numerical factors arise from fermionic Matsubara sums and the isotropic velocity average; they depend on the stated gap and density-of-states conventions. Rescaling the order parameter rescales all three coefficients. The expansion applies near the transition with sufficiently slow spatial variation; disorder, anisotropic pairing and strong coupling alter the coefficients or require additional components. Microscopic derivation also fixes the pair charge in the covariant gradient, producing the superconducting screening current and the Meissner effect.[ref]
Microscopic Derivation of the Ginzburg-Landau Equations in the Theory of Superconductivity by Lev Gor'kov. 1959, near-transition gap expansion and twice-electron charge
The neutral Bose and charged Fermi theories therefore share a complex order parameter and a phase-stiffness functional, while deriving that field from different microscopic objects. The Bogoliubov transformation mixes particle and hole fluctuations of the bosonic condensate in one case and paired fermionic excitations in the other. The static GL limit organizes long-distance behavior; the full microscopic theories retain excitation spectra and temperature dependence beyond that local near-transition expansion.
An elementary excitation is an approximately independent low-energy normal mode above a many-body equilibrium state. A Bogoliubov transformation mixes creation and annihilation operators to diagonalize a quadratic fluctuation Hamiltonian. For weakly interacting bosons,interpolating between sound and particle-like motion. Bosonic canonical commutators require . In BCS theory, fermionic particle–hole mixtures instead have and excitation energies . These fermionic quasiparticles must be distinguished from collective amplitude and phase oscillations of the pair field.
For the stated dimensionless first-order equation, a nonzero uniform static solution obeys . Thus . The zero field is also stationary, but is not the condensed minimum of the local potential .
Choose . To linear order, , so . Substitution and separation of real and imaginary parts giveDifferentiating the first relation and using the second yieldsThe same elimination holds for . A plane wave therefore givesThe density and phase components share this frequency because of density-phase conjugacy. They are coupled components of one positive-frequency Bogoliubov mode, not two independent excitations that happen to have equal energies. At , a constant phase change is a zero mode; the nonzero- elimination should not be used to assign an independent oscillation to a uniform density change.
Replacing the first-order time derivative by changes the number and structure of dynamical degrees of freedom. The linearized real and imaginary equations now decouple:The amplitude and phase modes of a second-order complex field consequently haveThe amplitude mode has a nonzero gap ; the phase mode is gapless with speed . Frequencies are nonnegative, so the printed expression is understood for or replaced by .
In the complex plane, an amplitude oscillation moves radially relative to the chosen equilibrium , and a phase oscillation moves tangentially, or along a short unit-circle arc beyond linear order. A first-order coupled mode combines them in quadrature. For a fixed spatial factor and , one possible parametrization isso traces a small ellipse about . Choose small enough that both components remain within the linear approximation.
A weak neutral Bose condensate realizes the first-order structure and its sound-like Bogoliubov spectrum. A particle–hole-symmetric effective complex field can realize the second-order structure, with a gapless Goldstone mode and a distinct amplitude mode. A neutral BCS superfluid likewise has collective phase and amplitude responses, although the amplitude response near pair-breaking energy need not be a sharp undamped particle; its fermionic quasiparticles are separate excitations.
In a charged bulk superconductor, long-range Coulomb interactions and electromagnetic dynamics remove the neutral sound-like phase branch from the low-frequency spectrum. The Anderson-Higgs mechanism in a superconductor produces a longitudinal plasma mode, schematically in an appropriate long-wavelength model. The amplitude scale is typically associated with in a simple BCS regime, with damping and mixing dependent on material and symmetry. One should not simply retain the neutral Goldstone dispersion after charging the field, nor identify the static Ginzburg-Landau functional alone with a complete time-dependent microscopic theory.
