Zero sound origin of acoustic plasmons in two-component Fermi gases
A. N. Afanasiev
Abstract
Collective density excitation spectrum in two-component Fermi gases is dominated by conventional optical plasmon at high frequencies and charge neutral gapless acoustic mode in the quasi-classical domain. In this work we reveal the identity between the latter acoustic plasmon and zero sound propagating in the slow component. Within the framework of two coupled collisionless kinetic equations with self-consistent electrostatic potential, we show that the mode stability to the long-range intracomponent Coulomb interaction is determined by the static screening by the fast quasiparticles. Depending on the magnitude of the effective Landau interaction parameter given by the ratio of Thomas-Fermi wavevectors in components, acoustic plasmon undergoes transformation from zero sound in almost ideal Fermi gas to ion-acoustic wave in both two and three dimensions. As it was recently shown for the particular case of type-I Weyl semimetals [Afanasiev, Greshnov and Svintsov, Phys. Rev. B 103, 205201 (2021)], strongly anisotropic two-component solid state plasma is a natural platform hosting this acoustic plasmon-zero sound mode which is experimentally accessible via standard energy-loss and time-domain techniques.