Abstract This tutorial review gives an elementary and self‐contained derivation of the standard identities (ψη(x) ∼ Fη e , etc.) for abelian bosonization in 1 dimension in a system of finite size L, following and simplifying Haldane's constructive approach. As a non‐trivial application, we rigorously resolve (following Furusaki) a recent controversy regarding the tunneling density of states, ρdos(ω), at the site of an impurity in a Tomonaga‐Luttinger liquid: we use finite‐size refermionization to show exactly that for g = 1/2 its asymptotic low‐energy behavior is ρdos(ω) ∼ ω. This agrees with the results of Fabrizio & Gogolin and of Furusaki, but not with those of Oreg and Finkel'stein (probably because we capture effects not included in their mean‐field treatment of the Coulomb gas that they obtained by an exact mapping; their treatment of anti‐commutation relations in this mapping is correct, however, contrary to recent suggestions in the literature). — The tutorial is addressed to readers with little or no prior knowledge of bosonization, who are interested in seeing “all the details” explicitly; it is written at the level of beginning graduate students, requiring only knowledge of second quantization, but not of field theory (which is not needed here). At the same time, we hope that experts too might find useful our explicit treatment of certain subtleties that can often be swept under the rug, but are crucial for some applications, such as the calculation of ρdos(ω) — these include the proper treatment of the so‐called Klein factors that act as fermion‐number ladder operators (and also ensure the anti‐commutation of different species of fermion fields), the retention of terms of order 1/L, and a novel, rigorous formulation of finite‐size refermionization of both F e—iΦ(x) and the boson field Φ(x) itself.
Abstract This tutorial review gives an elementary and self‐contained derivation of the standard identities (ψη(x) ∼ Fη e , etc.) for abelian bosonization in 1 dimension in a system of finite size L, following and simplifying Haldane's constructive approach. As a non‐trivial application, we rigorously resolve (following Furusaki) a recent controversy regarding the tunneling density of states, ρdos(ω), at the site of an impurity in a Tomonaga‐Luttinger liquid: we use finite‐size refermionization to show exactly that for g = 1/2 its asymptotic low‐energy behavior is ρdos(ω) ∼ ω. This agrees with the results of Fabrizio & Gogolin and of Furusaki, but not with those of Oreg and Finkel'stein (probably because we capture effects not included in their mean‐field treatment of the Coulomb gas that they obtained by an exact mapping; their treatment of anti‐commutation relations in this mapping is correct, however, contrary to recent suggestions in the literature). — The tutorial is addressed to readers with little or no prior knowledge of bosonization, who are interested in seeing “all the details” explicitly; it is written at the level of beginning graduate students, requiring only knowledge of second quantization, but not of field theory (which is not needed here). At the same time, we hope that experts too might find useful our explicit treatment of certain subtleties that can often be swept under the rug, but are crucial for some applications, such as the calculation of ρdos(ω) — these include the proper treatment of the so‐called Klein factors that act as fermion‐number ladder operators (and also ensure the anti‐commutation of different species of fermion fields), the retention of terms of order 1/L, and a novel, rigorous formulation of finite‐size refermionization of both F e—iΦ(x) and the boson field Φ(x) itself.
This tutorial gives an elementary and self-contained review of abelian bosonization in 1 dimension in a system of finite size L, following and simplifying Haldane's constructive approach. As a non-trivial application, we rigorously resolve (following Furusaki) a recent controversy regarding the tunneling density of states, ρdos(ω), at the site of an impurity in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid: we use finite-size refermionization to show exactly that for g=1/2 its asymptotic low-energy behavior is ρdos(ω)∼ω. This agrees with the results of Fabrizio & Gogolin and of Furusaki, but not with those of Oreg and Finkel'stein (probably because we capture effects not included in their mean-field treatment of the Coulomb gas that they obtained by an exact mapping; their treatment of anti-commutation relations in this mapping is correct, however, contrary to recent suggestions in the literature). --- The tutorial is addressed to readers unfamiliar with bosonization, or for those interested in seeing ``all the details'' explicitly; it requires knowledge of second quantization only, not of field theory. At the same time, we hope that experts too might find useful our explicit treatment of certain subtleties -- these include the proper treatment of the so-called Klein factors that act as fermion-number ladder operators (and also ensure the anti-commutation of different species of fermion fields), the retention of terms of order 1/L, and a novel, rigorous formulation of finite-size refermionization of both e−iΦ(x) and the boson field Φ(x) itself.
This is a pedagogical introduction to the general technique of bosonization of one-dimensional systems starting from scratch and assuming very little besides basic quantum mechanics and second quantization. The formalism is developed in a self-contained fashion and applied to the spinless and spin- Luttinger models, working out both single and two particle correlation functions. The implications of these results for the specific cases ofthe (anisotropic) Heisenberg and the Hubbard models are discussed. Although everything in these notes can befound in the published literature, detailed and explicit calculations of most of the results are given, which mayprove useful to beginning graduate students or researchers in this area.
We develop a self-contained approach to bosonization and refermionization using the Keldysh functional integral. Starting from fermionic particles, we bosonize the system and obtain a description in terms of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid, with, in addition, an infinite series of interaction terms arising from the curvature of the fermionic particle spectrum. We explicitly calculate the leading interaction term and check its consistency with a different approach based on the Matsubara framework, within which we calculate the second leading interaction term, as well. Moreover, we bosonize weakly and strongly interacting bosonic particles, and, finally, refermionize interacting phonons into non-interacting fermionic quasiparticles. The work culminates in a map between bosonic and fermionic particles and effective bosonic and fermionic excitations, representing phonons and fermionic quasiparticles.
These lecture notes originate from a one-semester course on the mathematical foundations of second quantization, first given at the Department of Physics of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in the Winter Semester 2025/26 to a mixed audience of physics and mathematics students. Their guiding thread is a class of physical models: spin-boson models, describing a two-level system coupled to a boson field. After summarizing the necessary background on unbounded operators, up to the Kato-Rellich and KLMN theorems, and developing direct sums and tensor products of Hilbert spaces and of unbounded operators, we treat single-mode boson fields, constructing the ladder and number operators and characterizing their domains, before moving to Fock spaces, second quantization, bosonic and fermionic annihilation and creation operators, and the canonical (anti)commutation relations. Throughout, spin-boson models provide both the motivation and the test bench for the formalism: we rigorously establish their self-adjointness, solve the pure dephasing and Jaynes-Cummings models explicitly, deriving their spectra and the qubit channels they induce, show how their multimode counterparts display irreversible decoherence and decay, and, in an appendix, prove the rotating-wave approximation for the quantum Rabi model with an explicit error bound. Finally, we use the KLMN theorem to construct spin-boson models with non-normalizable form factors, and briefly discuss stronger ultraviolet divergences and the need for renormalization. Exercises with full solutions are included.
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 theoretical description of trapped weakly-interacting Bose-Einstein condensates is characterized by a large number of seemingly very different approaches which have been developed over the course of time by researchers with very distinct backgrounds. Newcomers to this field, experimentalists and young researchers all face a considerable challenge in navigating through the ‘maze’ of abundant theoretical models, and simple correspondences between existing approaches are not always very transparent. This Tutorial provides a generic introduction to such theories, in an attempt to single out common features and deficiencies of certain ‘classes of approaches ’ identified by their physical content, rather than their particular mathematical implementation. This Tutorial is structured in a manner accessible to a non-specialist with a good working knowledge of quantum mechanics. Although some familiarity with concepts of quantum field theory would be an advantage, key notions such as the occupation number representation of second quantization are nonetheless briefly reviewed. Following a general introduction, the complexity of models is gradually built up, starting from the basic zero-temperature formalism of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. This structure enables readers to probe different levels of theoretical developments (mean-field, number-conserving and stochastic) according to their particular needs. In addition to its ‘training element’, we hope that this Tutorial will prove useful to active researchers in this field, both in terms of the correspondences made between different theoretical models, and as a source of reference for existing and developing finite-temperature theoretical models.