Gauge-invariant electromagnetic responses in superconductors

Abstract

Gauge invariance is essential for making physically meaningful predictions. In superconductors, mean-field Hamiltonians that explicitly break $U(1)$ symmetry often yield gauge-dependent results. While this issue has been resolved for linear responses in conventional superconductors, a unified framework that also covers unconventional superconductors and nonlinear responses has yet to be established. In this study, we present a comprehensive theoretical framework that enables gauge-invariant calculations of electromagnetic responses at arbitrary orders in external fields, applicable to both conventional and unconventional superconductors. Our construction generalizes the consistent-fluctuation-of-the-order-parameter (CFOP) approach to full photon vertices and admits a diagrammatic representation of the response kernel in terms of Feynman diagrams.