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arXiv:2307.07762

Weakly interacting Fermions: mean-field and semiclassical regimes

Chiara Saffirio

Published Jul 15, 2023• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The derivation of effective macroscopic theories approximating microscopic systems of interacting particles is a major question in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. In these notes we present an approximation of systems made by many fermions interacting via inverse power law potentials in the mean-field and semiclassical regimes, reviewing the material presented at the 11th summer school "Methods and Models of Kinetic Theory" held in Pesaro in June 2022. More precisely, we focus on weakly interacting fermions whose collective effect can be approximated by an averaged potential in convolution form, and review recent mean-field techniques based on second quantization approaches. As a first step we obtain a reduced description given by the time-dependent Hartree-Fock equation. As a second step we look at longer time scales where a semiclassical description starts to be relevant and approximate the many-body dynamics with the Vlasov equation, which describes the evolution of the effective probability density of particles on the one particle phase space.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2307.07762

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The derivation of effective macroscopic theories approximating microscopic systems of interacting particles is a major question in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. In these notes we present an approximation of systems made by many fermions interacting via inverse power law potentials in the mean-field and semiclassical regimes, reviewing the material presented at the 11th summer school "Methods and Models of Kinetic Theory" held in Pesaro in June 2022. More precisely, we focus on weakly interacting fermions whose collective effect can be approximated by an averaged potential in convolution form, and review recent mean-field techniques based on second quantization approaches. As a first step we obtain a reduced description given by the time-dependent Hartree-Fock equation. As a second step we look at longer time scales where a semiclassical description starts to be relevant and approximate the many-body dynamics with the Vlasov equation, which describes the evolution of the effective probability density of particles on the one particle phase space.
We review recent results concerning the evolution of fermionic systems. We are interested in the mean field regime, where particles experience many weak collisions. For fermions, the mean field regime is naturally linked with a semiclassical limit. Assuming some regularity of the interaction potential we show that the many body evolution of initial states close to Slater determinants exhibiting the appropriate semiclassical structure can be approximated by the Hartree-Fock equation. Our method provides precise bounds on the rate of the convergence.
In these notes, based on a mini-course held at the summer school "Methods and Models of Kinetic Theory" that took place in Porto Ercole in June 2016, we review some of the recent developments in the derivation of effective evolution equations starting from many-body quantum mechanics. We discuss the derivation of the Hartree equation in the bosonic mean-field limit, of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation describing the dynamics of initially trapped Bose-Einstein condensates and of the Hartree-Fock equation for fermions in a joint mean-field and semiclassical limit.
I review results concerning the derivation of effective equations for the dynamics of interacting Fermi gases in a high-density regime of mean-field type. Three levels of effective theories, increasing in precision, can be distinguished: the semiclassical theory given by the Vlasov equation, the mean-field theory given by the Hartree–Fock equation, and the description of the dominant effects of non-trivial entanglement by the random phase approximation. Particular attention is given to the discussion of admissible initial data, and I present an example of a realistic quantum quench that can be approximated by Hartree–Fock dynamics.
This thesis is about the derivation of effective mean field equations and their next-order corrections starting from nonrelativistic many-body quantum theory. Mean field equations provide an approximate ansatz for the description of interacting many-particle systems. In this ansatz the interaction between the particles is replaced by a self-consistent external potential leading to an effective one-body description of the many-particle system. Next-order corrections provide an approximation which goes one step further and tries to capture also subleading effects that are not resolved by the mean field ansatz. We present mathematical proofs for the validity of such effective theories for different models that are motivated, e.g., from the theory of ultracold atoms (the bosonic Hartree equation and the corresponding Bogoliubov theory) and from plasma physics (the motion of a tracer particle through a degenerate and dense electron gas). Starting from a many-body Schrödinger equation, our goal is to show that the solutions converge in a particular limit to the solutions to an effective mean field equation and its next-order corrections. After a short introduction and a summary in Chapter one, we present the main part of this work in three self-contained chapters. In Chapter two we analyze the dynamics of a large number N of nonrelativistic bosons in the weak coupling limit, i.e., for a coupling constant g_N=1/N. It is well known that in the limit of infinite particle number, the Hartree equation emerges as an effective one-particle theory of the Bose gas. This is closely related to the remarkable physical phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation at low temperature, namely that the majority of particles in a Bose gas occupies the same copy of a single one-particle quantum state. Our emphasis lies in the description of the few particles that fluctuate around the Bose-Einstein condensate. We show convergence of the fully interacting dynamics to an auxiliary time evolution in the norm of the N-particle space. This result allows us to prove several other assertions. Among other things, it is used to derive the Hartree equation with optimal speed of convergence 1/N for initial states that are close to ground states of interacting systems and also to prove convergence of the N-particle solution towards a time evolution obtained from the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian on Fock space. Chapter three is about the low energy properties of the weakly interacting homogeneous Bose gas. Here, we derive a novel estimate for low energy eigenfunctions stating that the probability for finding lll particles out of their total number N not in the condensate is exponentially small in the number lll. Using this bound, we then prove that the ground state wave function of the microscopic model satisfies certain quasifree type properties. The exponential decay is moreover used to provide an alternative proof for the validity of Bogoliubov's approximation for the low-lying energy eigenvalues. Bogoliubov theory states that the excitation energies of the Bose gas are given by excitations of free quasiparticles obeying an effective energy-momentum dispersion relation which is linear for small momentum. The linearity of the effective dispersion relation is an essential ingredient for the explanation of the superfluid character of the Bose gas. In Chapter four we study the time evolution of a single particle coupled through a pair potential to a dense and homogeneous ideal Fermi gas in two spatial dimensions. This type of model is well known in plasma physics where it is used to describe the energy loss of ions moving through a dense and degenerate electron gas. We analyze the model for a coupling parameter g=1 and prove closeness of the time evolution to an effective dynamics for large densities of the gas and for long time scales of the order of some power of the density. The effective dynamics is generated by the free Hamiltonian with a large but constant energy shift. To leading order, this energy shift is given by the spatially homogeneous mean field potential produced by the gas particles, whereas at next-to-leading order, one has to consider an additional correction to the mean field energy which is due to so-called recollision processes.
We study the dynamics of many-body Fermi systems, for a class of initial data which are close to quasi-free states exhibiting a nonvanishing pairing matrix. We focus on the mean-field scaling, which for fermionic systems is naturally coupled with a semiclassical scaling. Under the assumption that the initial datum enjoys a suitable semiclassical structure, we give a rigorous derivation of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equation, a nonlinear effective evolution equation for the generalized one-particle density matrix of the system, as the number of particles goes to infinity. Our result holds for all macroscopic times, and provides bounds for the rate of convergence.
The mean field limit for systems of many fermions is naturally coupled with a semiclassical limit. This makes the analysis of the mean field regime much more involved, compared with bosonic systems. In this paper, we study the dynamics of initial data close to a Slater determinant, whose reduced one-particle density is an orthogonal projection ωN with the appropriate semiclassical structure. Assuming some regularity of the interaction potential, we show that the evolution of such an initial data remains close to a Slater determinant, with reduced one-particle density given by the solution of the Hartree-Fock equation with initial data ωN. Our result holds for all (semiclassical) times, and gives effective bounds on the rate of the convergence towards the Hartree-Fock dynamics. 1