Nonthermal pairing glue of electrons in the steady state

The study of mechanisms for enhancing superconductivity has been a central topic in condensed matter physics because of the combination of fundamental and technological interests. One promising route is to exploit nonequilibrium effects in the steady state. Efforts in this direction have so far focused on enhancing the pairing mechanism known from thermal equilibrium through modified distributions for the electrons or the bosons mediating the electron–electron interaction. In this work, we identify an additional pairing mechanism that is active only outside thermal equilibrium. By generalizing Eliashberg theory to nonequilibrium steady states using the Keldysh formalism, we derive a set of Eliashberg equations that capture the effect of this genuinely nonthermal pairing glue even in the weak-coupling regime. We discuss two examples where this mechanism has a major impact. First, in a temperature-bias setup, we find that superconductivity is enhanced when the boson mediator is colder than the electrons. Second, we find that an incoherent drive of the boson mediator at energies much greater than the temperature pushes the system far from thermal equilibrium but leaves the critical coupling essentially unchanged, owing to a competition between electron heating and the enhancement of pairing by the nonthermal glue.