Emergent Higgsless Superconductivity

¹ NiPS Laboratory, INFN and Dipartimento di Fisica, University of Perugia, via A. Pascoli, I-06100 Perugia, Italy
² SwissScientific, chemin Diodati 10, CH-1223 Cologny, Switzerland

^a e-mail: cristina.diamantini@pg.infn.it
^b e-mail: ca.trugenberger@bluewin.ch

Published online: 22 March 2017

Abstract

We present a new Higgsless model of superconductivity, inspired from anyon superconductivity but P- and T-invariant and generalizable to any dimension. While the original anyon superconductivity mechanism was based on incompressible quantum Hall fluids as average field states, our mechanism involves topological insulators as average field states. In D space dimensions it involves a (D-1)-form fictitious pseudovector gauge field which originates from the condensation of topological defects in compact lowenergy effective BF theories. There is no massive Higgs scalar as there is no local order parameter. When electromagnetism is switched on, the photon acquires mass by the topological BF mechanism. Although the charge of the gapless mode (2) and the topological order (4) are the same as those of the standard Higgs model, the two models of superconductivity are clearly different since the origins of the gap, reflected in the high-energy sectors are totally different. In 2D thi! s type of superconductivity is explicitly realized as global superconductivity in Josephson junction arrays. In 3D this model predicts a possible phase transition from topological insulators to Higgsless superconductors.