Abstract
The quantum vacuum may become an electromagnetic superconductor in the presence of a strong external magnetic field of the order of 1016 Tesla. The magnetic field of the required strength (and even stronger) are expected to be generated for very short times in ultraperipheral collisions of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider. The superconducting properties of the new phase appear as a result of a magnetic-field-assisted condensation of quark–antiquark pairs with quantum numbers of electrically charged ρ ± mesons. We discuss similarities and differences between the suggested superconducting state of the quantum vacuum, a conventional superconductivity and the Schwinger pair creation. We argue qualitatively and quantitatively why the superconducting state should be a natural ground state of the vacuum at the sufficiently strong magnetic field. We demonstrate the existence of the superconducting phase using both the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model and an effective bosonic model based vector meson dominance (the ρ-meson electrodynamics). We discuss various properties of the new phase such as absence of Meissner effect, anisotropy of superconductivity, spatial inhomogeneity of ground state, emergence of a neutral superfluid component in the ground state and presence of new topological vortices in the quark–antiquark condensates.
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This work was supported by Grant No. ANR-10-JCJC-0408 HYPERMAG.
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- 1.
We briefly discuss an analogy between the magnetic-field-induced vacuum superconductivity and the Schwinger effect in Sect. 6.2.2.5, page 152.
- 2.
Since the magnetic flux coming through the superconductor’s boundary is a conserved quantity, the superconductor expels it from the superconductor’s bulk into thin vortexlike structures.
- 3.
Without loss of generality we consider the singly-charged bosons Φ instead of the usual doubly-charged Cooper pairs and we use a relativistic description of superconductivity.
- 4.
- 5.
Here we omit all terms with vanishing condensates as well as all kinetic terms.
- 6.
We have estimated the critical field only approximately since the phenomenological values of the NJL parameters G S,V are not known precisely [76]. Moreover, subtleties of the renormalization of the effective dimensionally reduced (1+1)-dimensional theory embedded in 3+1 dimensions provide us with an additional uncertainty.
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Chernodub, M.N. (2013). Electromagnetic Superconductivity of Vacuum Induced by Strong Magnetic Field. In: Kharzeev, D., Landsteiner, K., Schmitt, A., Yee, HU. (eds) Strongly Interacting Matter in Magnetic Fields. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 871. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37305-3_6
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