Renormalization of the electron-phonon interaction: a reformulation of the BCS-gap equation

A recently developed renormalization approach is used to study the electron-phonon coupling in many-electron systems. By starting from an Hamiltonian which includes a small gauge symmetry breaking field, we directly derive a BCS-like equation for the energy gap from the renormalization approach. The effective electron-electron interaction for Cooper pairs does not contain any singularities. Furthermore, it is found that phonon-induced particle-hole excitations only contribute to the attractive electron-electron interaction if their energy difference is smaller than the phonon energy. Copyright EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag 2003