What happens in the transition to superconductivity?

I learned about very interesting discoveries related to the quantum phase transition between the ordinary and superconducting phase (see this).

These kinds of findings are very valuable in the attempts to build a TGD based view of what exactly happens in the transition to super-conductivity. I have developed several models for high Tc superconductivity (see this, this and this but there is no single model.

Certainly, the TGD based view of magnetic fields distinguishing them from their Maxwellian counterparts is bound to be central for the model. However, the view about what happens at the level of magnetic fields in the transition to superconductivity, has remained unclear.

Consider first the findings of the research group. The basic question of how two-dimensional superconductivity can be destroyed without raising the temperature. The ordinary phase transition to superconductivity is induced by thermal fluctuations. Now the temperature is very close to the absolute zero and the phase transition is quantum phase transition induced by quantum fluctuations.

1. The material under study was a bulk crystal of tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) classified as a layered semi-metal. The tungsten ditelluride was converted into a two-dimensional material consisting of a single atom-thin layer. This 2-D material behaves as a very strong insulator, which means its electrons have limited motion and hence cannot conduct electricity.
2. Surprisingly, the material exhibits a lot of novel quantum behaviors, in particular, a switching between insulating and superconducting phases. It was possible to control this switching behavior by building a device that functions like an “on and off” switch.
3. At the next step, the researchers cooled the tungsten ditelluride down to exceptionally low temperatures, roughly 50 milliKelvin (mK). Then the material was converted from an insulator into a superconductor by introducing some extra electrons to the material. It did not take much voltage to achieve the superconducting state. It turned out to be possible to precisely control the properties of superconductivity by adjusting the density of electrons in the material via the gate voltage.
4. At a critical electron density, the quantum vortices rapidly proliferated and destroyed the superconductivity. To detect the presence of these vortices, the researchers created a tiny temperature gradient on the sample, making one side of the tungsten ditelluride slightly warmer than the other. This generated a flow of vortices towards the cooler end. This flow generated a detectable voltage signal in a superconductor, which can be understood in terms of the integral form of Faraday’s law. Voltage signals were in nano-volt scale.

Several surprising findings were made.

1. Vortices were highly stable and persisted to much higher temperatures and magnetic fields than expected. They survived at temperatures and fields well above the superconducting phase, in the resistive phase of the material.
2. The expectation was that the fluctuations perish below the critical electron density on the non-superconducting side, just as they do in ordinary thermal transition to superconductivity.

In contrast to this, the vortex signal abruptly disappeared when the electron density was tuned just below the critical value of density at which the quantum phase transition of the superconducting state occurs. At this critical (quantum critical point (QCP) quantum fluctuations drive the phase transition. What could be the interpretation of these findings in the TGD Universe and could they give hints for a more precise formulation of the TGD inspired model.

1. TGD leads to a rather detailed proposal for high Tc – and bio-superconductivity. There are reasons to think that this model might work also in the case of low temperature superconductivity, in particular in the proposed situation with one-atom-thick layer (see this, this, this and this).
2. The unique feature of the monopole flux tube is that its magnetic field needs no currents as a source. The cross section of the flux tube is not a disk, but a closed 2-surface. There is no boundary along which the current could flow and generate the magnetic field. In the absence of these ohmic boundary currents there is no dissipation and the natural interpretation is that electrons form Cooper pairs.

These monopole flux tubes are central for TGD based physics in all length scales and explain numerous anomalies related to the Maxwellian view of magnetic fields. The stability of the Earth’s magnetic field and the existence of magnetic fields in cosmic scales are two examples.

The monopole flux has a cross sectional area twice that of disk-like flux tube so that one can see the monopole flux tube as being obtained by gluing two disk-like flux tubes along the boundaries. The signature of the monopole flux tube is that magnetic flux is twice that of ordinary flux tubes.

The orbits of the disk-like boundaries would be light-like 3-surfaces. This is not in conflict with the fact that the boundaries look like static structure. The reason is that the metric of the space-time surface is induced from that of M⁴× CP₂ and the large CP₂ contribution to the induced 3-metric makes it light-like. One might say that the boundary is analogous to blackhole horizon. This picture allows us to sketch what could happen at the quantum critical point.

1. Both monopole flux tubes and disk-like flux tubes are present at the critical point. Monopole flux tubes dominate above the critical electron density whereas disk-like flux tubes dominate above it. In the transition pairs of disk-like flux tubes fuse to form monopole flux tubes and electrons at the boundaries combine to Cooper pairs inside the monopole flux tube and form a supra current. The transition would be a topological phase transition at the level of the space-time topology and something totally new from the standard model perspective.
2. Cyclotron energy scale, determined by the monopole flux quantization and flux tube radius, is expected to characterize the situation. The difference of the cyclotron energies for the monopole flux tube with Cooper pair and for two disk-like flux tubes with one electron should correspond to the binding energy of the Cooper pair. If the thermal energy exceeds this energy, superconductivity is lost. The disk-like flux tubes can however remain stable.
3. The transition could involve the increase of the effective Planck constant h_eff but its value would remain rather small as compared to its value of high Tc superconductivity. The value of h_eff should be correlated with the transition temperature since the difference of total cyclotron energies would be proportional to h_eff.

This picture does not yet explain why the vortices suddenly disappear at the critical electron density. The intuitive guess is that the density of electrons is not high enough to generate the disk-like monopole flux tubes.

1. Suppose that these flux tubes have a constant radius and fill the 2-D system so that a lattice like system consistent with the underlying lattice structure is formed.
2. There must be at least 1 electron per flux tube to create the magnetic field inside it. The magnetic flux is quantized and if the boundary of the disk contains single electron, the number of electrons per flux tube area S is 1: the density of electrons is n=1/S. If the electron density is smaller than this, the formation of disk-like flux tubes is not possible as also the transition to superconductivity.

This proposal is not consistent with the earlier model for high Tc superconductivity.

1. In high Tc superconductivity there are two critical temperatures. At the higher critical temperature Cooper pairs are believed to appear but super-conductivity appears at a lower temperature.
2. The earlier TGD based proposal is that the superconductivity appears at the first critical temperature in a short length scale so that no long scale supra currents are possible. The magnetic flux tubes would form short loops. At the lower critical temperature they would reconnect to form long flux loops.
3. The second possibility, suggested by the recent findings, is that disk-like half-monopole flux tubes carrying Ohmic currents at their boundaries are stabilized at the higher critical temperature. At the lower critical temperature they would combine to form monopole flux tubes.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.