Norman Hascoe Distinguished Lecture Series

Superconductivity is a concrete example of superflow with "charged" particles, whereas examples of the latter involving "neutral" particles constitute all of so-called "degenerate quantum matter" and includes Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). By exactly reproducing the original Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superconducting gap equation and recovering the BCS ground-state energy for all inter-fermion coupling, the BCS condensate that defines a superconductor is seen to be precisely a BE condensate of equal numbers of weakly-coupled two-electron as well as two-hole Cooper pairs that dynamically coexist with unpaired electrons. The resulting ternary boson-fermion (BF) gas mixture manifests this via a generalized BEC (GBEC) theory that predicts three BE condensed phases at low-enough temperatures, among which are two pure phases yielding transition temperatures typically a hundred times higher than the well-known BCS ceiling value of about 45K.