Note: This is a post by Brian Skinner as part of a blog exchange. He has his own blog, which I heartily recommend, called Gravity and Levity. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at MIT in theoretical condensed matter physics.
The central, and most surprising, idea in the conventional theory of superconductivity is the notion of Cooper pairing. In a Cooper pair, two electrons with opposite momentum somehow manage to overcome their ostensibly enormous repulsive energy and bind together to make a composite bosonic particle. These composite bosons are then able to carry electric current without dissipation.
But what does a Cooper pair really look like? In this post I’m going to try to draw a picture of one, and in the process I hope to discuss a little bit of physical intuition behind how Cooper pairing is possible.
To begin with, one should acknowledge that the “electrons” that…
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