| Abstract: | The appearance of unconventional pairing in superconducting cuprates is examined from a microscopic model, taking into account important properties of hole‐doped copper oxides. An exchange interaction between fermions and dominantly inter‐site bipolarons is considered to be the mechanism which leads to the pairing. Its momentum dependency is connected to the well‐established fermion–phonon anomalies in cuprate superconductors. Since charge carriers in these materials are strongly correlated, a screened Coulomb repulsion is added to this exchange term. Any ad hoc assumptions like anisotropy are avoided, but a microscopic explanation of unconventional pairing for coupling strengths that are in accordance with experimental facts is provided. One important outcome is a mathematically rigorous elucidation of the role of Coulomb repulsion in unconventional pairing, which is shown to be concomitant with a strong depletion of superconducting pairs. The theory, applied to the special case of LaSr 214, predicts at optimal doping i) a coherence length of , which is the same as that obtained from the Ginzburg–Landau critical magnetic field measured for this material, and ii) d‐wave pair formation in the pseudogap regime, that is, at temperatures much higher than the superconducting transition temperature. |
