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Institute
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 ϕ 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 ϕ together with gauge invariance to build up the noninteracting chemical potential away from particle-hole symmetry. We further analyze the role of ϕ 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.
We investigate theoretically and experimentally the statistical properties of the inhomogeneous order-parameter distribution (OPD) at the verge of the superconductor-insulator transition (SIT). We find within two prototype fermionic and bosonic models for disordered superconductors that one can identify a universal rescaling of the OPD. By performing scanning-tunneling microscopy experiments in three samples of NbN with increasing disorder we show that such a rescaling also describes the experimental data with excellent accuracy. These results can provide a breakthrough in our understanding of the SIT.