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Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards Section A Physics and Chemistry

What is a quasi-particle?

J. R. Schrieffer

Published Jul 1, 1970• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The concept of a quasi-particle excitation in an interacting many-body system will be discussed from both the physical and the math e matical points of vi e w.Th e physi cal origin of mass enhancement, wave fun ction re normalization, interac tio ns betwee n quasi-particles, etc. will be presented.Landau's Fermi liquid theory, including th e quasi-particle kinetic equation, will be reviewed.Finally, the domain of validity of the quasi-particl e approximation will be discuss ed.

DOI
10.6028/jres.074a.044

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The concept of a quasi-particle excitation in an interacting many-body system will be discussed from both the physical and the math e matical points of vi e w.Th e physi cal origin of mass enhancement, wave fun ction re normalization, interac tio ns betwee n quasi-particles, etc. will be presented.Landau's Fermi liquid theory, including th e quasi-particle kinetic equation, will be reviewed.Finally, the domain of validity of the quasi-particl e approximation will be discuss ed.
Landau (1958) gave a rigorous microscopic derivation of his phenomenological Fermi -liquid theory starting from the first principles Hamiltonian of strongly interacting Fermions. The derivation is based on an asymptotic expansion in small parameters such as q/kF, bc.>/EF, kT/EF, where q and c.> represent the wave numbers and frequencies of real excitations of the system. Landau showed that the dynamics of these low-lying excitations (quasiparticles and collective modes) is governed by classical transport equations with all quantum many-body effects absorbed into effective interaction parameters. Landau's approach has been generalized to superfluid Fermi liquids and superconductors by Leggett (1965) and, going beyond linear response, by Eliashberg (1971). Their ideas merged into a recent review on the quasiclassical approach to superfluid 3 He by Serene and Rainer (1983). I will use the notation of this review throughout this paper. Landau's transport theory together with its offsprings will be called 'quasiclassical theory in the following. In this context it is important to mention that Eilenberger (1968) and Larkin and Ovchinnikov (1968) have shown that the complete theory of superconductors can be formulated as a quasiclassical transport theory. Surprisingly, this theory permits calculating microscopic properties, e.g. the quasiparticle excitation spectrum, which are predominantly governed by quantum effects.
In this paper we propose a new way of organizing many-body perturbation theory in the Path-integral formulation where a set of quasi-particle wave-functionals ψψψ's are introduced and are identified with quasi-particles in Landau Fermi liquid theory. We show how Fermi liquid theory can be obtained through ψψψ's in this new framework of perturbation theory, where the only assumption is adiabaticity between non-interacting and interacting states and the quasi-particle renormalization factor z does not appear explicitly. Consequences of our new formulation are discussed.
1. Introduce density distribution and momentum distribution of non-interacting Fermi gas. 2. Discuss the transport property of a Fermi gas through a quantum point contact. 3. Discuss Fermi surface as a key of a non-interacting Fermi gas and its generalization to a Fermi liquid. 4. Introduce the effective mass and the quasi-particle residue as two key parameters of the Fermi liquid. 5. Introduce the self-energy and the universal relations between the effective mass, the quasi-particle residue and the self-energy. 6. Discuss Fermi polaron as an example of the Fermi liquid, and show these universal relations with this example. 7. Discuss the divergence of the effective mass and vanishing of quasi-particle residue when Fermi liquid description fails. 8. Introduce the radio-frequency spectroscopy and how it measures the polaron energy and the quasi-particle residue. 9. Summarize different spectroscopy measurements in ultracold atomic systems.
It is quite beyond the purpose of this book to give a comprehensive review of the modern theory of metals. I shall touch only on those topics which are related to the mainstream of this course: the problem of strong interactions. As I have noted before, strong interactions can appear as a result of renormalization, and from the aesthetic point of view this is, perhaps, the most interesting case. As we shall see in Part IV, such renormalizations are particularly strong in one-dimensional systems, where practically any interaction leads to quite dramatic effects. Therefore a one-dimensional electron gas neither undergoes a phase transition (this is forbidden due to the low dimensionality), nor behaves like a system of free electrons. On the contrary, in higher dimensions at low temperatures a system of electrons either undergoes a phase transition (superconductivity, magnetic ordering, etc.), or behaves like a free electron gas. When temperatures as low as several degrees became experimentally available, physicists discovered that an enormous amount of experimental data on normal metals can be described by the model where one neglects electron–electron interactions. This apparent miracle was explained by Landau who demonstrated that the interaction pattern drastically simplifies close to the Fermi surface. Provided the system does not undergo a symmetry breaking phase transition, all interactions except forward scattering effectively vanish on the Fermi surface and low-lying excitations carry quantum numbers of electrons. Therefore they are called quasi-particles . The meaning of the word quasi will become clear in a moment.