Introduction In many cases in physics, one has to deal simultaneously with collective and single-particle excitations of the system. The collective excitations are usually bosonic in nature while the single-particle excitations are often fermionic. One is therefore led to consider a system which includes bosons and fermions. In this book we discuss applications of a general algebraic theory of mixed Bose- Fermi systems to atomic nuclei. The collective degrees of freedom here can be described in terms of a system of interacting bosons as discussed in a previous book (Iachello and Arima, 1987), henceforth referred to as Volume 1. The single-particle degrees of freedom represent the motion of individual nucleons in the average nuclear field. They are described in terms of a system of interacting fermions. The coupling of fermions and bosons leads to the interacting boson-fermion model which has been used extensively in recent years to discuss the properties of nuclei with an odd number of nucleons. The interacting boson-fermion model was introduced by Arima and one of us in 1975 (Arima and Iachello, 1975). It was subsequently expanded by Iachello and Scholten (1979) and cast into a form more readily amenable to calculations. As in the corresponding case of even-mass systems, the algebra of creation and annihilation operators can be realized in several ways. One of these is the Hoistein-Primakoff realization which leads to a slightly different version of the interacting boson-fermion model called the truncated quadrupole phonon-fermion model (Paar, 1980; Paar and Brant, 1981), based on the boson realization introduced by Janssen, Jolos and Donau in 1974 and discussed in Sect. 1.4.6 of Volume 1.
The signature of superfluidity in bosonic systems is a sound-wave-like spectrum of the single particle excitations which in the case of strong interactions is roughly temperature independent. In Fermionic systems, where Fermion pairing arises as a resonance phenomenon between free Fermions and paired Fermionic states (examples are: the atomic gases of
6Li or
40K controlled by a Feshbach resonance, polaronic systems in the intermediary coupling regime,
d-wave hole pairing in the strongly correlated Hubbard system), remnants of such superfluid characteristics are expected to be visible in the normal state. The single particle excitations maintain a sound-wave-like structure for wave vectors above a certain
qmin(T) where they practically coincide there with the spectrum of the superfluid phase for
T<Tc. Upon approaching the transition from above this region in
q space extends down to small momenta, except for a narrow region around
q=0 where such modes change into damped free particle like excitations.