In a three-dimensional uniform isotropic continuum obeying the Principle of Galilean relativity, with one bare particle mass , the Fermi-liquid effective mass satisfies
A band effective mass need not satisfy this relation.[ref]
For the stipulated in the occupation figure, this relation requires if those assumptions apply. At fixed , is half its free-particle value, so moving by from the Fermi surface costs approximately instead of . The factor of three belongs to the three-dimensional angular average, not to a universal definition of effective mass.
Landau quasiparticle 2026-10-18
A Landau quasiparticle is a fermionic excitation connected continuously to a Fermi gas particle when interactions preserve the phase. Near an isotropic Fermi surface, its energy relative to the chemical potential is , with Fermi momentum and Fermi velocity .[ref]
The Pauli exclusion principle restricts decay. For a three-dimensional normal Fermi liquid with regular short-range interactions, a representative low-energy lifetime model is
Here is an energy scale and is dimensionless; sharpness requires at zero temperature.[ref]
For an original example, stipulate and . At , the decay energy is , just of the excitation energy; halving reduces that ratio to . Approaching the Fermi surface improves the particle description even though the microscopic interaction has not weakened. This quadratic illustration is three-dimensional; low-dimensional corrections require separate analysis.
Figure 1.
Quasiparticle occupation and energy near a Fermi surface
. Original local models with , Fermi-liquid effective mass and quasiparticle residue . The finite-temperature curve is the Fermi-Dirac distribution of Landau quasiparticles; the dashed particle distribution is a separate schematic. The shaded energy shell uses . These stipulated examples are not a fit to helium-3. Details.
A normal Fermi liquid has interacting fermions whose low-energy excitations can be followed continuously from those of a Fermi gas, provided no phase transition destroys that correspondence. A Landau quasiparticle is a particle together with the surrounding many-body response. It has the appropriate charge and spin, a renormalized dispersion and a long lifetime close to the Fermi surface. Interactions remain in both the quasiparticle parameters and the interactions between quasiparticles; they have not been discarded.
Near an isotropic Fermi surface,
The last relation defines the local isotropic Fermi-liquid effective mass. The Landau quasiparticle energy functional expresses how changing occupations shifts other quasiparticle energies:
with normalization of the sum absorbed into . Its angular components give Landau parameters describing collective density and spin response.
The Pauli exclusion principle severely restricts the available final states for low-energy collisions. In an ordinary three-dimensional Fermi liquid with regular interactions,
At zero temperature the decay width decreases faster than , making quasiparticles increasingly sharp near the Fermi surface. Their coherent spectral weight is the quasiparticle residue , and the true Electron momentum distribution has a discontinuity of height at zero temperature. The rest of the spectral weight is incoherent. The quasiparticle occupation itself still follows a Fermi-Dirac distribution.
The low-temperature electronic heat capacity is linear, , where is the spin-summed quasiparticle density of states. In an isotropic spin-one-half model, the uniform spin susceptibility and compressibility take the forms
Thus enhanced effective mass and residual interactions can separately change observable responses. The familiar electrical resistivity requires a mechanism relaxing electrical current, such as allowed Umklapp processes; collisions in a perfectly clean Galilean-invariant continuum conserve total momentum and do not alone produce a finite dc resistivity.
Zero sound is a collisionless collective density oscillation sustained by the quasiparticle interaction; ordinary first sound occurs when collisions establish local equilibrium during a cycle. Metals and normal liquid helium-3 supply important examples. The description fails in phases with no sufficiently sharp low-energy quasiparticles, such as generic interacting one-dimensional systems, and must be modified after pairing or another ordering transition.