Pre-formed Cooper pairs and Bose-Einstein condensation in cuprate superconductors

A two-dimensional (2D) assembly of noninteracting, temperature-dependent, pre-formed Cooper pairs in chemical/thermal equilibrium with unpaired fermions is examined in a binary boson-fermion statistical model as the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) singularity temperature $T_c$ is approached from above. Compared with BCS theory (which is {\it not} a BEC theory) substantially higher $T_c$'s are obtained without any adjustable parameters, that fall roughly within the range of empirical $T_c$'s for quasi-2D cuprate superconductors.