The electron-phonon interaction lets one electron polarize the ionic lattice and another interact with that delayed deformation. Phonon-mediated electron attraction acts over energy transfers below a characteristic phonon scale. Pairing additionally requires a net attractive interaction in some allowed pairing channel after screened Coulomb repulsion is included. In the conventional weak-coupling situation, retardation separates the low phonon scale from the much larger electronic scale, reducing the effective repulsion. The Cooper instability then makes a Fermi surface unstable to an arbitrarily weak net attraction in the idealized channel; finite temperature cuts off its logarithmic enhancement.
In BCS theory, a momentum-independent pairing amplitude within the cutoff obeys a self-consistency equation containing , with quasiparticle energy . At a continuous transition, take . A constant effective density of states and coupling combine into , while the band bottom truncates the negative-energy side at , with . This gives the supplied linearized gap equation. Its integrand is even, so withit becomes . If both cutoffs are much larger than , the given large-cutoff integral gives . Consequently the asymmetric-cutoff BCS transition temperature isFor , this reduces to ; for , it is . The second limit requires as well as . Weak at fixed nonzero supplies that limit, but taking afterward need not preserve it.
For a three-dimensional spin-degenerate parabolic electron band in the degenerate regime,DefineHolding the other model parameters fixed givesThus the log-log slope is below the cutoff-density scale and zero above it. For the specified parameters,This density crossover of a fixed-coupling BCS cutoff model is the requested prescribed model. A real three-dimensional parabolic band also has a changing density of states, so keeping constant as density varies is an additional imposed assumption, not a consequence of that dispersion.
For noninteracting spinless bosonic pairs, mass and density , homogeneous ideal Bose gas condensation givesUsing the supplied integral gives . Its slight difference from the more precise is consistent with the rounded integral. Write . On the low-density branch,Since , no part of the high-density plateau exceeds . The formal crossing condition isThe crossing occurs near and .
The apparent low-density excess should not be read as a reliable transition above the ideal condensation scale of preformed pairs. On this extrapolation grows without bound, violating the degenerate-gas and large-lower-cutoff approximations. It reaches one already near ; well before using an arbitrarily small density, the chemical potential, pairing, density of states and pair fluctuations need a self-consistent treatment. The asymptotic formula and ideal-boson curve compare two stipulated models, rather than solving the full BCS-BEC crossover.
Excited-state saturation. Consider first a uniform three-dimensional noninteracting gas of identical spinless bosons in a large box. Set the one-particle ground energy to zero. The Bose-Einstein distribution is , with quantum gas fugacity . For dispersion , the excited density of states isUsing the thermal de Broglie wavelength , integration givesThe polylogarithm is . Its finite value at implies a maximum excited population , with . Once this is less than , the excess particles occupy the ground state macroscopically. This is Bose-Einstein condensation, rather than occupation of a state by merely one or a few atoms.
Transition and condensate fraction. Setting the saturation number equal to gives the homogeneous ideal Bose gas condensation temperatureBelow this temperature, approaches zero from below in the thermodynamic limit, and particle conservation givesAbove there is no macroscopic condensate and adjusts to keep fixed. At finite , the chemical potential remains slightly below the ground energy and the transition is rounded.
Original uniform ideal-gas condensate fraction and schematic accumulation in the lowest state below the critical temperature; the exponent is for a three-dimensional box
. Details. Energy and the role of geometry. The excited-state internal energy isThe zero-energy condensate contributes no term to this energy in the ideal model. Below ,Condensation depends on low-energy state counting: for a uniform quadratic-dispersion gas, a finite-temperature bulk condensate requires spatial dimension greater than two. A trap changes the density of states and therefore the temperature law; a three-dimensional harmonic trap gives a cubic, rather than , condensate-fraction exponent. Finally, an ideal-gas condensate should not automatically be called a superfluid: its free quadratic spectrum has zero critical speed by the Landau criterion. Interactions matter for the robust collective-flow properties of real dilute condensates.

