Exact study of the effect of level statistics in ultrasmall superconducting grains

The reduced BCS model that is commonly used for ultrasmall superconducting grains has an exact solution worked out long ago by Richardson in the context of nuclear physics. We use it to check the quality of previous treatments of this model, and to investigate the effect of level statistics on pairing correlations. We find that the ground-state energies are on average somewhat lower for systems with nonuniform than uniform level spacings, but both have an equally smooth crossover from the bulk to the few-electron regime. In the latter, statistical fluctuations in ground-state energies strongly depend on the grain's electron number parity.