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.
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.
Abstract The low-temperature properties of a wide range of many-fermion systems spanning metals, quantum gases and liquids to nuclear matter are well understood within the framework of Landau’s theory of Fermi liquids. The low-energy physics of these systems is governed by interacting fermionic quasiparticles with momenta and energies near a Fermi surface in momentum space. Nonequilibrium properties are described by a kinetic equation for the distribution function for quasiparticles proposed by Landau. Quasiparticle interactions with other quasiparticles, phonons, or impurities lead to internal forces acting on a distribution of nonequilibrium quasiparticles, as well as collision processes that ultimately limit the transport of mass, heat, charge, and magnetization, as well as limiting the coherence times of quasiparticles. For Fermi liquids that are close to a second-order phase transition, e.g., Fermi liquids that undergo a superfluid transition, incipient Cooper pairs—long-lived fluctuations of the ordered phase—provide a new channel for scattering quasiparticles, as well as corrections to internal forces acting on the distribution of nonequilibrium quasiparticles. We develop the theory of quasiparticle transport for Fermi liquids in the vicinity of a BCS-type superfluid transition starting from Keldysh’s field theory for nonequilibrium, strongly interacting fermions. The leading corrections to Fermi-liquid theory for nonequilibrium quasiparticle transport near a Cooper instability arise from the virtual emission and absorption of incipient Cooper pairs. Our theory is applicable to quasiparticle transport in superconductors, nuclear matter, and the low-temperature phases of liquid 3He. As an implementation of the theory we calculate the pairing-fluctuation corrections to the attenuation of zero sound in liquid 3He near the superfluid transition and demonstrate quantitative agreement with experimental results.
We introduce a new renormalisation scheme to construct the Landau quasiparticles of Fermi fluids. The scheme introduces an energy cutoff Λ to remove the resonant couplings, enabling the dressing of the particles into quasiparticles via a unitary transformation. The dynamics of the quasiparticles is then restricted to low-energy transitions and is fully determined by an effective Hamiltonian which unifies the Landau function f, the pair interaction g responsible for superfluidity, and the collision amplitude A responsible for transport and equilibration. Studying the flow equation that results from infinitesimal variations of the cutoff, we recover the Bethe-Salpeter relation between f and the forward limit of A, and we demonstrate an analogue relation between g and the frontal limit of A. We show that our effective theory captures all the low-energy phenomena of Fermi liquids, from the equation of state to the transport properties, both in the normal and in the superfluid phase. We apply it to the calculation of non-Fermi liquid corrections to the quasiparticle lifetime. This publication is continued by arXiv:2607.07041 where we apply the effective theory to a Fermi fluid of ultracold atoms.
The microscopic theory of a superfluid Fermi liquid at finite temperature is developed for the case of a pure system with S-wave pairing, and applied to the calculation of the static properties. As a function of $\ensuremath{\theta}\ensuremath{\equiv}\frac{T}{{T}_{c}}$ these properties are determined entirely by the Landau parameters F0, F1, Z0, etc., characterizing quasiparticle interactions in the normal phase. In particular the spin susceptibility $\ensuremath{\chi}$ and the density of the normal component ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}$ are given by $\frac{\ensuremath{\chi}(\ensuremath{\theta})}{\ensuremath{\chi}(1)}=(1+\frac{1}{4}{Z}_{0})\frac{f(\ensuremath{\theta})}{[1+\frac{1}{4}{Z}_{0}f(\ensuremath{\theta})]},$ $\frac{{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}}{\ensuremath{\rho}}=(1+\frac{1}{3}{F}_{1})\frac{f(\ensuremath{\theta})}{[1+\frac{1}{3}{F}_{1}f(\ensuremath{\theta})]},$ where the universal function $f(\ensuremath{\theta})\ensuremath{\equiv}\ensuremath{-}{[\ensuremath{\nu}(0)]}^{\ensuremath{-}1}{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}_{\mathrm{p}}(\frac{\mathrm{dn}}{d{E}_{\mathrm{p}}})$ is the "effective density of states near the Fermi surface" relative to its value $\ensuremath{\nu}(0)$ in the normal phase. Thus the often-quoted expression ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}=\frac{1}{3}{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}_{\mathrm{p}}{\mathrm{p}}^{2}(\frac{\mathrm{dn}}{d{E}_{\mathrm{p}}})$ is valid for an interacting system only in the limit $T\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$. In the latter part of the paper a simple phenomenological theory of "Fermi-liquid" effects on $\ensuremath{\chi}$ and ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}$ is developed for arbitrary conditions (including the presence of impurities and pairing with $l\ensuremath{\ne}0$); it is found that under most circumstances explicit expressions for $\ensuremath{\chi}$ and ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{n}$ may be obtained which involve only the Landau parameters and a suitably generalized effective density of states. The theory should apply to the possible superfluid phase of He3 and to most superconductors. It is suggested that the Knight shift in nontransition-metal superconductors should display some "Fermi-liquid" effects. The weak-field dc penetration depth $\ensuremath{\lambda}(T)$ is shown to be insensitive to such effects both in the Pippard limit and near Tc; however, in a London superconductor at lower temperatures the correction to $\ensuremath{\lambda}(T)$ should be observable and yield a direct estimate of F1.
We give a Hamiltonian-based interpretation of microscopic Fermi liquid theory within a renormalization group framework. The Fermi liquid fixed-point Hamiltonian with its leading-order corrections is identified and we show that the mean field calculations for this model correspond to the Landau phenomenological approach. This is illustrated first of all for the Kondo and Anderson models of magnetic impurities which display Fermi liquid behaviour at low temperatures. We then show how these results can be deduced by a reorganization of perturbation theory, in close parallel to that for the renormalized φ4 field theory. The Fermi liquid results follow from the two lowest order diagrams of the renormalized perturbation expansion. The calculations for the impurity models are simpler than for the general case because the self-energy depends on frequency only. We show, however, that a similar renormalized expansion can be derived also for the case of a translationally invariant system. The parameters specifying the Fermi liquid fixed-point Hamiltonian are related to the renormalized vertices appearing in the perturbation theory. The collective zero sound modes appear in the quasiparticle-quasihole ladder sum of the renormalized perturbation expansion. The renormalized perturbation expansion can in principle be used beyond the Fermi liquid regime to higher temperatures. This approach should be particularly useful for heavy fermions and other strongly correlated electron systems, where the renormalization of the single-particle excitations are particularly large. We briefly look at the breakdown of Fermi liquid theory from a renormalized perturbation theory point of view. We show how a modified version of the approach can be used in some situations, such as the spinless Luttinger model, where Fermi liquid theory is not applicable. Other examples of systems where the Fermi liquid theory breaks down are also briefly discussed.
For pure fermionic systems, and in the absence of symmetry breaking (e.g. magnetism, superconductivity, …), two types of metallic phases are well established: (i) the “normal” Fermi liquid phase in d = 3 presented in Chapters 12 and 19 via the response and the Green functions techniques; and (ii) the “anomalous” Luttinger liquid phase in d = 1 originally formulated with the bosonization technique by which the fermionic operators are represented in terms of “bosonic” density operators (Luther and Peschel (1974); Haldane (1981)) with the exact solution (Mattis and Lieb (1965)) of the Tomonaga–Luttinger model (Tomonaga (1950); Luttinger (1963)) discussed inmany reviews and books (see for instance the book by Giamarchi (2004)). Here, to stress similarities and differences between the Fermi liquid and the Luttinger liquid, we will follow the alternative route of response and Green functions techniques (Dzyaloshinskii and Larkin (1973), Di Castro and Metzner (1991), Metzner et al. (1998)) and add a few comments on the renormalization group approach (Metzner and Di Castro (1993)). As we have seen in Chapters 12 and 19, the Fermi liquid is described asymptotically by the free low-lying single-particle excitations, i.e., the quasiparticles with a zero-kelvin discontinuous occupation number in momentum space n k (see Eq. (18.54)) at a well defined Fermi surface (k = k F ): where here k F> and k F< indicate the limit k → k F from above and below. This discontinuity still marks the Fermi surface in the interacting system. The finite reduction of the single-particle spectral weight z kF with respect to the Fermi gas (z kF = 1) is given by the finite (i.e. non-critical) “wavefunction renormalization” (see Eq. (18.94)). The presence of the discontinuity at the Fermi surface, together with the Pauli principle, compel the inverse quasiparticle lifetime to be τ −1 ≈ max( T 2 , ϵ 2 ), where _ is the deviation of the energy of the quasiparticle from the Fermi energy. The energy uncertainty ħτ −1 due to the finite lifetime of a quasiparticle near the Fermi surface is small compared to its energy ϵ , and the quasiparticle concept is well defined. All the momentum transferring scattering processes become asymptotically ineffective, as derived phenomenologically in Chapter 12 and confirmed microscopically in Chapter 19.
The phenomenological theory of a Fermi liquid is generalized to nonequilibrium conditions. Landau's theory is reformulated to include fluctuations of the distribution function and quasiparticle energy. The method of fluctuation in kinetic equations is used to establish the collision integral of the quasiparticle Boltzmann equation. This collision integral is expressed in terms of the parameters of Landau's theory, and includes dynamic screening effects. The results are compared with recent theories of transport in Fermi liquids.