Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-quantum-matter-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2023/2/a/solution

For a uniform continuum gas with pair interactions depending on relative positions, a Galilean boost changes every particle momentum by and leaves the interaction energy unchanged. Write . The transformed many-body Hamiltonian operator is
The resting ground state has , so the Galilean boost energy of an interacting gas is
The mass here is the bare particle mass, because this is an exact transformation of the microscopic kinetic energy. Substituting the Fermi-liquid effective mass would omit the change in interaction energy encoded by the Landau quasiparticle energy functional. This conclusion requires the Principle of Galilean relativity; a gas in a lattice or a fixed external potential energy landscape need not obey it.

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