Superconductivity from the Repulsive Electron Interaction – from 1D to 3D

Abstract

There is a growing realisation that the high-Tc superconductivity found in the cuprates in the 1980's has an electronic mechanism – namely, anisotropic pairing from the repulsive electron-electron interaction. Superconductivity from electron repulsion is conceptually interesting in its own right, and has indeed a long history of discussion. In fact, in the field of electron gas, i.e., electron system with the Coulombic electron-electron interaction, Kohn and Luttinger [1] pointed out, as early as in the 1960's, that the electron gas should become superconducting with anisotropic pairing (having nonzero relative angular momenta) at sufficiently low temperatures in a perturbation theory. This becomes an exact statement for dilute enough electron gas, where p-wave pairing (with the relative angular momentum = 1) should arise, as far as the static interaction is concerned [2, 3].