Adiabatic transition from a BCS superconductor to a Fermi liquid and phase dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the physics of an adiabatic transition from a BCS superconductor to a Fermi liquid for an exponentially slow decreasing pairing interaction. We show that, depending on the order of the thermodynamic limit and large times, a situation can arise in which the Fermi liquid keeps a memory of the parent BCS state. Furthermore, a time inversion of the interaction, supplemented by a manipulation analogous to a spin-/photon-echo experiment, allows us to recover the parent BCS state. Moreover, we study the evolution of the order parameter phase $\ensuremath{\phi}$ in transforming the BCS superconductor to a conventional metal. Since the global phase is the conjugate variable of the density, we explicitly show how to use the dynamics of $\ensuremath{\phi}$ together with gauge invariance to build up the noninteracting chemical potential away from particle-hole symmetry. We further analyze the role of $\ensuremath{\phi}$ in restoring the gauge-invariant current response when the noninteracting Fermi liquid is approached starting from a BCS superconductor in the presence of an external vector field.