# Comment on “Temperature Dependence of the Josephson Current”

In a recent letter , Overhauser has claimed that the accepted calculations of the temperature dependence of the Josephson current  are incorrect. His contention is that broken pair states, in the BCS  terminology, should not be included as initial states in calculating the contribution of tunneling to the free energy of two weakly coupled superconductors.

In fact, all terms that depend on the difference of the phases of the order parameters in the two superconductors must be included and such phase dependences are present (via intermediate states) in the omitted terms. As Overhauser himself shows, including them reproduces the usual result.

This is really all that needs to be said. The following remarks may, however, clarify the issue—if further clarification is needed.

Consider the anomalous averages

$$F^>(𝐤,t,t^{})a_𝐤(t)a_𝐤(t^{}),\mathrm{and}F^<(𝐤,t,t^{})a_𝐤(t^{})a_𝐤(t).$$
(1)   
The difference between the conventional ($`C`$) and Overhauser ($`O`$) way of evaluating these averages may be summarized in the following relations for their Fourier transforms with respect to $`tt^{}`$:

$$F_C^>(𝐤,\omega )=B(𝐤,\omega )[1f(\omega )],F_C^<(𝐤,\omega )=B(𝐤,\omega )f(\omega ),$$
(2)   
as opposed to

$$F_O^>(𝐤,\omega )=B(𝐤,\omega )[1f(\omega )]^2,F_O^<(𝐤,\omega )=B(𝐤,\omega )f(\omega )^2.$$
(3)   
Above, $`B(𝐤,\omega )`$ is an odd function of $`\omega `$ whose form is not essential for the argument and $`f(\omega )=[\mathrm{exp}(\beta \omega )+1]^1`$ is the Fermi function, with $`\beta `$ the reciprocal of the temperature.

Note that the conventional calculation yields forms which agree with the general fluctuation-dissipation requirement

$$F^>(\omega )=e^{\beta \omega }F^<(\omega ),$$
(4)   
whereas these quantitites calculated according to the Overhauser prescription do not, showing that the ad hoc suppression of states (which treats initial and intermediate states asymmetrically) is unphysical.

Work supported in part by the NSF under grant DMR-9805613.