Professor Andrey V. Chubukov
Department of Physics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The theory of superconductivity, for which Nobel Prize was given in 1972, named electron-phonon interaction as a glue which overcomes Coulomb repulsion and binds fermions into pairs which condense and super-conduct. I review recent and not so recent works aiming to understand whether a nominally repulsive Coulomb interaction can by itself give rise to superconductivity. I first review a generic scenario of the pairing by electron-electron interaction, put forward by Kohn and Luttinger back in 1965 in their attempt to explain superfluidity in 3He, and then discuss modern studies of the electronic mechanism of superconductivity in the cuprates, Fe-pnictides, and in doped graphene.
