Past exam of the condensed matter physics major option course of the University of Oxford / 2019 / 6 / a

In a conventional superconductor, an attractive pairing interaction forms Cooper pairs and a phase-coherent condensate. The elementary fermionic excitations have a superconducting energy gap $\Delta$; breaking a pair into two excitations costs at least $2\Delta$. The density of thermally excited quasiparticles is exponentially small for $k_{B}T\ll \Delta$. Nevertheless the vanishing DC electrical resistivity below the critical temperature is a property of the coherent supercurrent, not a claim that all thermal quasiparticles disappear. Below the relevant critical-current and critical-field limits, a homogeneous bulk sample carries dissipationless current; above the superconducting transition the normal resistivity returns.

In a semiconductor, the band gap separates filled valence states from empty conduction states because of the periodic crystal potential and orbital hybridization. Thermally exciting carriers across the gap produces both conduction electrons and valence holes. For an intrinsic sample,Thus its electrical resistivity generally rises rapidly on cooling, with an activated factor $e^{E_g/(2k_{B}T)}$ up to mobility and density-of-states prefactors. This differs from the zero-resistivity condensate response. Dopant freeze-out and extrinsic-carrier regimes require their own activation scales; the intrinsic formula is not universal for every doped sample.