BCS theory
This phenomenon is closely analogous to that of Type 1 superconductivity in solid state physics. The first theoretical description of nuclear pairing was proposed at the end of the 1950s by Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and David Pines (which contributed to the reception of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 by Bohr and Mottelson). It was close to the BCS theory of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer, which accounts for metal superconductivity. Theoretically, the pairing phenomenon as described by the BCS theory combines with the mean field theory: nucleons are both subject to the mean field potential and to the pairing interaction.