By Giorgio Vassallo and Andras Kovacs
The discovery of superconductivity is over 100 years old. While superconducting materials have been studied in much detail over the past 100 years, it remains a grand intellectual challenge to understand how metals completely loose electric resistivity at low temperatures, and it remains an open question whether room temperature superconductivity can be achieved. Inspired by these challenges, we believe it is time to properly understand how superconductivity really works.
How is our book different from the multitude of preceding books that aim to explain superconductivity? Each book chapter contains new insights with respect to preceding superconductivity models. In the first chapter, we formulate the dynamics of coherent electron states and review direct experimental signatures of Bose-Einstein condensation in superconductors. In the second chapter, we go through experimental data which demonstrates that superconductivity phenomena is incompatible with free-flowing individual electron pairs, and this invalidates such superconductivity theories that are based on the hypothesis of free-flowing electron pairs. We discuss the physical mechanism that generates Meissner flows, which are responsible for superconductors' perfect diamagnetism, and derive the London equation using the appropriate methodology for Bose-Einstein condensates. It turns out that Meissner flows are generated by coherent electron oscillations that become energetically favored over the non-oscillating state - similarly to the operating principle of free electron lasers. In the third chapter, we derive the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature limit for coherent electrons in metals; the reader will learn how to apply such thermodynamic concepts to delocalized electrons that were previously applied in the context of non-interacting gases and how to account for non-isotropic crystal structures. In the fourth chapter, we discuss the catalytic effect of phase transitions on Bose-Einstein condensation. In the fifth chapter, we derive a special electron bonding state from first principles: its spectroscopic signatures are directly observed in cuprate superconductors and its phase transition catalyzes the coherence of electrons. Based on these new insights, we formulate a methodology for the computational screening of higher temperature superconductors.
The Zitterbewegung related part is in the first chapter: it investigates why and how the coherent state of electrons is a stable configuration. We use the Zitterbewegung electron model to derive a Darwin-like Lagrangian, and its properties demonstrate the stability of coherent electron states in some circumstances.
Superconductivity is thus a macroscopic phenomenon whose microscopic origin cannot be understood without the Zitterbewegung electron model.