Thermodynamics of ultrasmall metallic grains in the presence of pairing and exchange correlations: Mesoscopic fluctuations

Konstantin N. Nesterov, Y. Alhassid

Published 2012-04-25, updated 2013-02-02Version 2

We study the mesoscopic fluctuations of thermodynamic observables in a nanosized metallic grain in which the single-particle dynamics are chaotic and the dimensionless Thouless conductance is large. Such a grain is modeled by the universal Hamiltonian describing the competition between exchange and pairing correlations. The exchange term is taken into account exactly by a spin-projection method, and the pairing term is treated in the static-path approximation together with small-amplitude quantal fluctuations around each static fluctuation of the pairing field. Odd-even particle-number effects induced by pairing correlations are included using a number-parity projection. We find that the exchange interaction shifts the number-parity effects in the heat capacity and spin susceptibility to lower temperatures. In the regime where the pairing gap is similar to or smaller than the single-particle mean level spacing, these number-parity effects are suppressed by exchange correlations, and the fluctuations of the spin susceptibility may be particularly large. However, for larger values of the pairing gap, the number-parity effects may be enhanced by exchange correlations.