By G P Malik
World Scientific
This specialist book on superconductivity proposes an approach to the topic, based on the Bethe–Salpeter equations, that allows a description of the characteristics of superconductors (SCs) that are considered unconventional.
The basic theory of superconductivity, elaborated in 1957 by Bardee, Cooper and Schrieffer (BCS), which was worth a Nobel prize to its “fathers”, proves itself to be inadequate in describing the behaviour of high-temperature superconductors (HTSCs) – materials that have a critical temperature higher than 30 K. In this monographic work, the author shows how a generalisation of the BCS equations enables the superconducting features of non-elemental SCs to be addressed in the manner that elemental SCs are dealt with in the original theory. This generalisation is achieved by adopting the “language” of Bethe–Salpeter.
It was the intention of the author to give an essential treatment of the topic, without including material that is not strictly necessary, and to keep it reasonably simple and accessible. Nevertheless, quantum field theory (QFT) and its finite-temperature version (FTFT) are used to derive some equations in the text, so a basic knowledge of them is needed to follow the dissertation.
