A simple derivation of the zero-temperature BCS functional from the reduced BCS Hamiltonian

Abstract

We consider a grand-canonical reduced BCS Hamiltonian on the full fermionic Fock space with an attractive pairing interaction supported in an energy shell around the Fermi surface. For fixed chemical potential, we prove that the exact finite-volume ground-state energy differs from the minimum of the corresponding finite-volume BCS functional by a volume-independent error. As a consequence, the BCS variational principle is exact for the ground-state energy density in the thermodynamic limit.