Dispersion of plasmons in three-dimensional superconductors

Abstract

We study the plasma branch of an homogeneous three-dimensional electron gas in an $s$-wave superconducting state. We focus on the regime where the plasma frequency ${\omega }_p$ is comparable to the gap $\Delta$, which is experimentally realized in cuprates. Although a sum rule guarantees that the departure of the plasma branch always coincides with the plasma frequency, the dispersion and lifetime of the plasmons is strongly affected by the presence of the pair condensate, especially at energies close to the pair-breaking threshold $2\Delta$. When ${\omega }_p$ is above $1.7\Delta$, the level repulsion is strong enough to give the plasma branch an anomalous, negative dispersion with a minimum at finite wavelength. At non-zero temperature and at ${\omega }_p>2\Delta$, we treat in a non-perturbative way the coupling of plasmons to the fermionic excitations, and show that a broadened plasma resonance inside the pair-breaking continuum coexists with an undamped solution in the band gap. This resonance splitting is associated with the presence of multiple poles in the analytic continuation of the propagator of the Cooper pairs.

6 pages, 4 figures

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