Properties: Spectroscopy

This chapter focuses on the spectroscopy of the superconducting state. Various manifestations of macroscopic quantisation are described, including flux quantisation, the Josephson effect, vortices, and the Little–Parks effect. The Ginzburg–Landau theory and its microscopic derivation are presented. An interesting new direction, the search for the lossless ground current state, undergoes an intensive development. If the electronic density of states contains several peaks, it manifests as a multigap structure. Impurity scattering and, especially, the pair-breaking effect can drastically affect the spectrum and lead to gapless superconductivity. Pairing can be induced by the proximity effect (S–N contact). The isotope effect is the signature of the pairing mechanism, but it can be affected by Coulomb terms, magnetic impurities, and polaron formation. The study of fluctuations forms a large area of research. Fluctuations affect the behaviour of heat capacity and nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation, lead to peculiar paraconductivity, and so on.