Dramatically Enhanced Superconductivity in Elemental Bismuth from Excitonic Fluctuation Exchange

Motivated by the remarkable discovery of superconductivity in elemental Bismuth at ambient pressure, we study its normal state in detail using a combination of tight-binding (TB) band-structure supplemented by dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). We show that a two-fluid model composed of preformed and dynamically fluctuating excitons coupled to a tiny number of carriers provides a unified rationalization of a range of ill-understood normal state spectral and transport data. Based on these, we propose that resonant scattering involving a very low density of renormalized carriers and the excitonic liquid drives logarithmic enhancement of vertex corrections, boosting superconductivity in Bi. A confirmatory test for our proposal would be the experimental verification of an excitonic semiconductor with electronic nematicity as a 'competing order' on inducing a semi-metal-to semiconductor transition in Bi by an external perturbation like pressure.