Many-body selection rule for quasiparticle pair creations in centrosymmetric superconductors

Abstract

When metal becomes superconducting, new optical excitation channels are created by particle-hole mixing. These excitation channels contribute negligibly to optical responses in most superconductors, but they can be relevant in ultra-strong-coupling superconductors that are close to the Bose-Einstein condensate regime. Recently, selection rules for these excitations have been formulated based on single-particle anti-unitary symmetries in the mean-field theory. While being potentially useful for studying optical properties of ultra-strong-coupling superconductors, they had fundamental limitations because significant quantum fluctuations invalidate meanfield approaches. Here, we use many-body states to formulate an optical selection rule that does not rely on the mean-field approximation. In this approach, the physical meaning of the previous selection rules becomes clearer as they are simply recast as the selection rule for many-body inversion eigenstates, not involving antiunitary symmetries. This selection rule applies not only to the Bogoliubov quasiparticles of Fermi liquids but also to non-Fermi-liquid quasiparticles and electrically charged bosonic excitations. We also study the Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces, whose topological stability is closely related to the selection rule. We provide a many-body formulation of their topological charges and show that the low-energy optical conductivity of the Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces depends crucially on their secondary topological charge. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results to the stability of the superconducting state.