UC Merced

The thermal field theory is applied to fermionic superfluids by doubling the degrees of freedom of the BCS theory. We construct the two-mode states and the corresponding Bogoliubov transformation to obtain the BCS thermal vacuum. The expectation values with respect to the BCS thermal vacuum produce the statistical average of the thermodynamic quantities. The BCS thermal vacuum allows a quantum-mechanical perturbation theory with the BCS theory serving as the unperturbed state. We evaluate the leading-order corrections to the order parameter and other physical quantities from the perturbation theory. A direct evaluation of the pairing correlation as a function of temperature shows the pseudogap phenomenon, where the pairing persists when the order parameter vanishes, emerges from the perturbation theory. The correspondence between the thermal vacuum and purification of the density matrix allows a unitary transformation, and we found the geometric phase associated with the transformation in the parameter space.