Do Dynamical Excitonic Liquid Correlations Mediate Superconductivity in Elemental Bismuth?

Abstract

Motivated by the remarkable discovery of superconductivity in elemental Bismuth, we study its normal state in detail using a combination of tight-binding (TB) and-structural supplemented by dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). We show that a two-fluid model composed of preformed and dynamically fluctuating excitons coupled to a tiny number of carriers provides a unified rationalization of a range of ill-understood normal state spectral and transport data. Based on these, we propose that resonant scattering involving a very low density of renormalized carriers and the excitonic liquid drives logarithmic enhancement of vertex corrections, boosting superconductivity in $Bi$. A confirmatory test for our proposal would be the experimental verification of an excitonic semiconductor with electronic nematicity as a `competing order' on inducing a semi-metal-to semiconductor transition in $Bi$ by an external perturbation like pressure.