Interacting Fermion Systems

Abstract

This chapter first studies the interaction effect of a Fermi sea on a single particle propagator and the related phenomenon of orthogonality catastrophe in X-ray spectrum. It then looks at a weakly interacting Fermi gas using Hartree–Fock approximation and introduces the notion of Fermi liquid. It discusses the concept and the appearance of quasiparticle in Fermi liquid. In addition to the standard quasiparticle description of Fermi liquid, the chapter also introduces a hydrodynamic description of Fermi liquid, which can be viewed as higher dimensional bosonization. Using the spin-density-wave state as an example, it then discusses how interaction can cause instability of Fermi liquid and generate a symmetry breaking phase transition to a spin ordered phase. Several theoretical methods, such as mean-field theory, variatonal approach, and RPA method are introduced within the interacting fermion systems. The low energy O(3) non-linear sigma model for the spin ordered phase is derived, where close attention has been paid to the possible topological terms in the non-linear sigma model. The effect of topological terms on the low energy dynamics of spin waves is discussed.