Existence and consequences of Coulomb pairing of electrons in a solid

It is shown from first principles that, in the periodic potential of a crystalline solid, short-range (i.e., screened) binary Coulomb interactions can lead to a two-electron bound state. It is further suggested that these composite bosonic states (charge -2e, and typically spin zero) could mediate an effectively attractive interaction between pairs of conduction electrons close to the Fermi level. This necessarily short range attractive interaction, which is crucially dependent on the band structure of the solid, and is complementary to the phonon-mediated one, may provide a source for the existence and properties of short correlation-length electron pairs (analogous to but distinct from Cooper pairs) needed to understand high temperature superconductivity. Several distinctive and observable characteristics of the proposed pairing scheme are discussed