The BCS energy gap at low density

We show that the energy gap for the BCS gap equation is $$\begin{aligned} \varXi = \mu \left( 8 {\mathrm{e}}^{-2} + o(1)\right) \exp \left( \frac{\pi }{2\sqrt{\mu } a}\right) \end{aligned}$$ Ξ = μ 8 e - 2 + o ( 1 ) exp π 2 μ a in the low density limit $$\mu \rightarrow 0$$ μ → 0 . Together with the similar result for the critical temperature by Hainzl and Seiringer (Lett Math Phys 84: 99–107, 2008), this shows that, in the low density limit, the ratio of the energy gap and critical temperature is a universal constant independent of the interaction potential V. The results hold for a class of potentials with negative scattering length a and no bound states.

Breaking of the Similarity Principle in Markov Generators of Low Density Limit Type and the Role of Degeneracies in the Landscape of Invariant States

The similarity principle is an extension of the principle of thermal relaxation that naturally arises in the stochastic limit of quantum theory. We construct examples of Low Density Limit (LDL) generators, associated to an environment state in equilibrium at inverse temperature β, which admit non-(β, HS)-equilibrium states. We prove that in some cases, the attraction domain of the (β, HS)-equilibrium state is empty. This means that the similarity principle, in its original thermodynamical formulation, can be broken in the LDL limit. This result is obtained as a consequence of a more general phenomenon: the role of degeneracies in the spectrum of the Liouvillian of the system Hamiltonian associated to the generator. We start from the definition of LDL type generators given in [5] and we introduce a finer classification of these generators based on the above degeneracies. The simplest subclass, called 2-generic, is a nontrivial extension of the generators associated to the so-called Λ and V configurations, widely used in quantum optics and involving 2 levels of the system Hamiltonian. Since each 2-generic block involves 3 or 4 levels of the system Hamiltonian we expect that they can reveal some interesting new physical phenomenon, as it happened in the 2-level case. In the last section, we restrict our attention to a 3-level system with a Hamiltonian that is associated to a class of 2-generic LDL generators. Finally, we prove that, for some LDL generators in this class the statement formulated at the beginning holds true.

Quantum Markov Semigroups of Low Density Limit: the Generic Case

We investigate the structure of quantum Markov generators that describe the reduced dynamics of a test particle interacting with a dilute Bose gas in the low density limit. These generators, called low density limit type generators (LDL), differ from the weak coupling limit type generators (WCL) studied in [4, 5] because of the presence of the T-operator that describes the change in momentum of the gas particle due to collisions with the test particle. We propose a general definition of Markov generator of stochastic limit type that includes (almost) all generators arising in the stochastic limit approach and we prove that the associated semigroups as well as their invariant states (or weights) have a very special structure which extends the explicit representation for the generic quantum Markov semigroups of weak coupling limit type, due to Accardi, Hachicha and Ouerdiane [7]. We also investigate the structure of invariant states and give conditions on the T - operator for the existence of a unique invariant state and of equilibrium states.