Physical Review Letters features “Sauter-Schwinger Effect in a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Superconductor” as journal cover Since the 1960s a deep and surprising connection has followed the development of superconductivity and quantum field theory, where the Anderson-Higgs mechanism and the similarities between the Dirac and Bogoliubov–de Gennes equations are the most intriguing examples.
In a recent work “Sauter-Schwinger Effect in a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Superconductor” published on Physical Review Letters, we follow further this parallelism and show that it predicts an outstanding phenomenon: the superconducting Sauter-Schwinger effect. As in the quantum electrodynamics Schwinger effect, where an electron-positron couple is created from the vacuum by an intense electric field, we show that an electrostatic field can generate two coherent excitations from the superconducting ground-state condensate.
We are glad that our work has been selected for an Editors’ Suggestion and is featured as journal cover of this monthly issue.