Superconductors with Topological Order

Abstract

We propose a mechanism of superconductivity in which the order of the ground state does not arise from the usual Landau mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking but is rather of topological origin. The low-energy effective theory is formulated in terms of emerging gauge fields rather than a local order parameter and the ground state is degenerate on topologically non-trivial manifolds. The simplest example of this mechanism of superconductivty is concretely realized as global superconductivty in Josephson junction arrays.