Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2009 Section B B2 c Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
In a Hall effect measurement, a current flows along and a magnetic field is applied along . The transverse Lorentz force initially deflects the mobile charges, building a transverse electric field until the net transverse current vanishes. Defining , the one-carrier Drude model gives . Thus electron-like carriers give and hole-like carriers give .
A nearly filled band can conduct through holes: its missing electrons behave as positive mobile charges. Metals can have both electron-like and hole-like Fermi surface sheets. In the weak-field two-carrier approximation the Hall coefficient isThe sign depends on the carrier densities and squared mobilities; it need not identify the most numerous carrier. Experimentally the Hall voltage changes sign when the field or current reverses, allowing subtraction of unwanted longitudinal-voltage pickup. Anisotropic bands and different scattering rates complicate a literal conversion of into a carrier count.
Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2009 Section B B3 Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
The de Haas-van Alphen effect is an oscillation of equilibrium magnetization, and hence magnetic susceptibility, as Landau levels pass through the Fermi energy when the field changes. For a fixed slice perpendicular to the field, Onsager quantization givesAt , successive crossings change by one, soHere is the oscillation frequency in inverse field. In three dimensions, integrating the oscillatory response over the momentum parallel to the field causes most sections to cancel by phase averaging. The leading surviving contributions come from stationary, hence extremal, cross-sectional areas. Low temperature and sufficiently weak scattering are needed to resolve the levels. Measuring several field directions therefore probes the shape of the Fermi surface rather than only a single scalar electron density.
For the cylindrical sheet, . The measured frequency givesThere are electrons per site in this band, with two spin states per wavevector. Thus the occupied disk takes fraction of the square Brillouin zone:This uses the paper's circular, electron-occupied disk approximation and equal band populations.
In the tight-binding approximation, hopping to the two neighbors at adds phase factors and . Their sum is ; absorb twice the hopping matrix element into . With no or hopping this yields . For , occupancy is centered on . The filling fraction of an independent cosine band is , requiring the occupied strip , so sheet consists of the two planes ; sheet similarly has . Each extends along , with no dispersion in that direction. The sheet is a cylinder along , of radius .
Numerically the planar offsets are , the zone boundary is , and the cylinder radius is in dimensionless coordinates. If instead, the band minimum is at the zone edge; occupying its lowest two-thirds puts the planes at or , with the central third unoccupied. The sign of the hopping must therefore accompany an absolute placement of these open sheets. The following sketch uses and the stipulated independent-band model, before any avoided crossings caused by additional interorbital hybridization.
Independent-band Fermi-surface cross-sections for negative cosine hopping and equal populations of the three bands
. Details. Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2012 2 b Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Different measurements reveal different aspects of electronic band structure; a convincing determination combines their constraints.
Angle-resolved photoemission. In angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, photons of known energy eject occupied electrons. Measuring their kinetic energy and emission angle reconstructs binding energy and the component of crystal momentum parallel to the surface:Here is the sample work function when kinetic energy is referenced to the nearby vacuum; an analyzer energy scale requires its own work-function calibration. Momentum is conserved modulo a surface reciprocal lattice vector, neglecting photon momentum. Tracking the peaks maps occupied dispersion relations and the Fermi surface. The measured intensity also contains the matrix element, the Fermi-Dirac distribution and the spectral function, so an absent bright feature does not establish an absent band. For a three-dimensional solid, the perpendicular momentum requires a final-state model. Inverse photoemission spectroscopy probes unoccupied states by injecting electrons and detecting emitted photons.
Optical spectroscopy. Photon absorption and ellipsometry measure interband transitions, optical selection rules and the complex dielectric response. Because optical photon momentum is small on the scale of the Brillouin zone, direct transitions approximately preserve crystal momentum. Their onset constrains a direct band gap; a threshold involving a phonon can reveal an indirect band gap. Peak positions constrain energy differences between bands, but the response also depends on the joint density of states and optical matrix elements, so it does not uniquely determine every .
Quantum oscillations and cyclotron resonance. In clean samples at low temperature, the de Haas-van Alphen effect measures oscillations in magnetization and the Shubnikov-de Haas effect measures oscillations in electrical resistivity as the inverse magnetic field is varied. Their period in inverse magnetic field is , where Onsager quantization relates to an extremal Fermi-surface area perpendicular to the field:Rotating the magnetic field maps the geometry of extremal orbits. The thermal damping determines the cyclotron effective mass,with the appropriate magnitude for a hole orbit. Cyclotron resonance supplies the corresponding dynamical mass through . These are detailed probes near the Fermi level, rather than measurements of all occupied bands. Diffraction supplies the reciprocal lattice needed to label the measured momenta, but diffraction by itself is not a measurement of electronic dispersion.
Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2013 2 c Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A normal Fermi liquid describes an interacting fermion system whose low-energy excitations remain continuously connected to adding particles to or removing particles from a Fermi gas. The elementary long-lived excitation is a Landau quasiparticle: adding a particle also changes the surrounding many-body state. Its energy, velocity and interactions are renormalized, even though its electric charge and spin remain those appropriate to the excitation.
Near an isotropic Fermi surface,Residual interactions make the quasiparticle energy depend on the occupations of other quasiparticles, expressed by the Landau quasiparticle energy functional. Its angular components give the Landau parameters controlling density and spin responses. Thus the successful particle picture does not mean that interactions have become zero.
Pauli blocking restricts the final states available for low-energy collisions. In an ordinary three-dimensional Fermi liquid with regular interactions, a representative decay law isAt , the width vanishes faster than , so an excitation becomes increasingly sharp as it approaches the Fermi surface. Its coherent spectral weight is the quasiparticle residue , and the physical electron occupation has a discontinuity of height at zero temperature. Incoherent spectral weight accounts for the remainder. The quasiparticle occupations themselves obey a Fermi-Dirac distribution.
Several leading thermodynamic signatures retain their gas-like form but have interaction-dependent coefficients. In particular,for an isotropic spin-one-half model, with the spin-summed quasiparticle density of states per volume. effective mass changes , while the dimensionless interaction parameters separately change the spin susceptibility and compressibility. Collisionless collective density motion can propagate as zero sound, distinct from the single-particle excitations.
The quasiparticle scattering rate often underlies a low-temperature contribution to metallic electrical resistivity, but a mechanism relaxing electrical electric current is needed. In a clean Galilean-invariant continuum, electron-electron collisions conserve total momentum and do not alone give a finite dc electrical resistivity. Crystal Umklapp scattering or other current-relaxing processes change that conclusion.
Normal liquid helium-3 and many metals motivate the Fermi-liquid framework. Pairing, magnetic ordering or other transitions can reconstruct the low-energy states. Generic interacting one-dimensional fermion systems instead form a different low-energy state, so the three-dimensional quasiparticle conclusions should not simply be transferred to a chain.
For a spin-degenerate band, each unit cell contributes two available states. An even electron count per cell can fill an integer number of bands; a band insulator additionally needs a global gap between the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied bands. Even filling alone is not sufficient when bands overlap.
For a free two-dimensional gas with spin degeneracy two,The reciprocal vectors of the periodic potential are and . Its first Brillouin zone is the square , of side and area ; the real-space cell has side .
At zero potential, the extended-zone Fermi surface is the circle of radius . Since , it crosses every square face but misses the corners. For Fermi-surface reconstruction in a weak square potential, weak positive potential opens gaps at the Bragg crossings: the second band has electron pockets at the two inequivalent edge centres , while unfilled regions of the first band form a hole pocket at the zone corner . Opposite edges are identified: four edge half-pockets are two electron pockets, and four corner pieces are one hole pocket.
A square Brillouin zone reconstructs the free Fermi circle into edge-centred electron pockets and a corner-centred hole pocket
. Source. Details. For the circular-cap carrier count in a square Brillouin zone, put and . Each circular cap outside a square face has areaNo two such caps overlap in the specified interval. The total second-band electron area is . The first-band hole area is the square area minus the occupied central-circle area, . Including spin,Thus at ,The carrier densities are the electron- and hole-pocket counts, not the total electron density. The carrier compensation and even band filling in a square lattice follows because their difference obeys , so compensation occurs at . These area formulas are the limit, before finite-gap reconstruction changes the pocket shapes.[ref]
The filling per real-space cell is . In the given interval, the only even integer filling is , again requiring . At any other fixed filling a full gap cannot yield an ordinary spin-degenerate band insulator in this unchanged periodicity. In particular, the system retains excess electron carriers even after its holes disappear.
A rough gap threshold comes from comparing different symmetry directions, rather than only a direct zone-face gap. Define . The zone-face two-plane-wave gap for a cosine potential follows because each cosine couples plane waves by , giving the one-dimensional zone-edge levels . The four-plane-wave splitting at a square-zone corner is the sum of two such pairs. The potential is separable in , so to first orderThe indirect gap of a separable square cosine potential is consequentlyAt the compensated filling, this is , with . An insulator needs both the even filling and a positive indirect gap. At the touching threshold the gap is zero; a positive direct gap at every Bragg crossing is not by itself sufficient. The estimate neglects higher-plane-wave corrections and is not an exact critical amplitude.
Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2016 2 c Solution 2026-10-18
A magnetic field quantizes a charged carrier's cyclotron motion into Landau levels. For an isotropic parabolic band, neglecting spin splitting,The degeneracy of each orbital level per unit perpendicular area is per spin. Increasing the field changes both the level spacing and the number of states in each level. Successive levels cross the Fermi energy, producing an oscillatory density of states and hence quantum oscillations in thermodynamic and transport quantities.
For a general closed semiclassical orbit, Onsager quantization relates its wavevector-space area to field:Setting this area to an extremal Fermi-surface cross-section gives successive inverse-field crossings separated byA typical oscillatory contribution is proportional to . The oscillations are periodic in , not in . In three dimensions, extremal cross-sections dominate because contributions from other longitudinal momenta cancel by phase averaging. Rotating the field therefore maps the shape of the Fermi surface.
Quantized orbital crossings and their periodicity in inverse magnetic field
. Details. Oscillations in magnetization are the de Haas-van Alphen effect; oscillations in longitudinal electrical resistivity are the Shubnikov-de Haas effect. They are most readily observed in clean samples at low temperature. The thermal damping factor isand a common first-harmonic disorder factor is . Thus the Landau spacing must be sufficiently large compared with thermal broadening and disorder broadening, approximately and , with the displayed factors giving the quantitative suppression.
The temperature dependence measures the cyclotron effective mass, and the field-dependent damping probes the quantum lifetime . That lifetime need not equal the momentum relaxation time controlling electrical conductivity: small-angle scattering can broaden Landau levels while relaxing electric current inefficiently. Spin splitting can generate further modulation or resolved spin structure. Oscillations are not the same as the ordinary smooth magnetoresistance or cyclotron resonance; they probe quantized orbital state counting near the Fermi energy.
Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2017 2 c Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
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 formsThus 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.
Past exam of the quantum condensed matter course of the University of Cambridge 2017 4 Solution Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
Noninteracting spectral line. Treat as a wavevector, so physical crystal momentum is . Write ; an energy zero at the chemical potential can be chosen throughout. The temporal factor of a noninteracting state is . With the Fourier transform convention ,Thus its normalized frequency spectral function isOne should not square the delta distribution as if it were an ordinary finite-time transition amplitude. More precisely, the fermionic retarded Green function is . Its Fourier transform is , whose negative imaginary part divided by is the same delta peak.
Interactions and lifetime. Interactions change the dispersion through the real part of the self-energy and permit decay into other excitations through its imaginary part. In the simplest quasiparticle-pole model, exponential decay of the retarded amplitude givesPerforming the causal integral,The corresponding Lorentzian quasiparticle spectral peak isIts total frequency integral is one. The exponential amplitude lifetime is ; the probability lifetime is . Describing as a scattering rate therefore requires the lifetime convention to be specified. The energy half-width is .
A general interacting electron is more accurately described by near the pole. The coherent peak then integrates to the quasiparticle residue and an incoherent continuum carries the remaining weight. In an energy-unit self-energy convention,Linearizing the real denominator gives and at the pole. The requested unit-weight Lorentzian is the normalized quasiparticle model, not the most general exact interacting spectrum.
Peak position and width. At fixed , put and . Differentiation givesIt is positive for and negative for , so the only maximum is at , with height . Setting to half this height gives . ThereforeIn energy units the maximum is and the half-width is . Frequency dependence of the self-energy would require reconsidering both the shape and peak position.
Fermi gas and Fermi liquid. A noninteracting Fermi gas has a delta-function spectral line at its bare dispersion for every momentum. A normal three-dimensional Fermi liquid has a shifted coherent peak plus incoherent spectral weight; close to the Fermi surface its width scales as . At zero temperature the peak becomes arbitrarily sharp at the Fermi surface, while it broadens farther away. Spectral functions include addition and removal weight; occupied-only photoemission contains an extra Fermi factor.
Photoemission measurement. A photon of known energy ejects an electron. Measure its kinetic energy and emission direction. For binding energy below the Fermi level and the appropriate calibrated work function , conservation of energy givesConservation of momentum parallel to a periodic surface giveswhere is a surface reciprocal-lattice vector. At suitable photon energies the photon momentum can be neglected; at higher energies it must be retained. The surface breaks perpendicular translation symmetry, so the perpendicular crystal momentum generally needs a final-state model. A two-dimensional band can be reconstructed directly from the parallel components.
Within the sudden approximation and electric-dipole approximation, photoemission intensity and spectral function are related byHere is measured relative to the chemical potential. Instrumental resolution convolves the product and inelastic scattering adds background. Thus ARPES maps the occupied electron removal spectral function, weighted by a matrix element; it does not measure the full unoccupied spectrum or an unweighted spectral function automatically. Bright ridges give dispersions, and intrinsic widths give decay information after instrumental effects are removed.
Reading the supplied image. Its bright ridges form a graphene-like cone. The crossing near is the Dirac point, not in general the Fermi level. In the paper's plotted energy coordinates its energy is roughly –. A velocity follows from a branch slope independently of the energy zero:For example, the lower branch moves by about between and . This gives andReading other points changes the estimate by tens of percent. The original exam image has unequal energy increments on nearly equally spaced labelled ticks, so it does not justify a precise fitted velocity. The value is an estimate of the cone slope extrapolated to the Fermi crossing, rather than a measured derivative exactly at a visibly identified Fermi cutoff.
To determine a Fermi energy, first calibrate the Fermi edge, then subtract the chosen reference energy. Neither a Fermi-level marker nor an explicit energy-zero convention is supplied in this crop. If its upper termination near is intended to represent the Fermi cutoff, the conditional graph answer is on that axis, or relative to the Dirac crossing. Identifying the crossing itself as the Fermi energy would incorrectly assume undoped graphene.
The research article cited by the exam identifies this as linearly polarized graphene ARPES and independently states for the substrate-doped sample. That resolves the relative energy when this external calibration is admitted.[ref]
https://hrg.pusan.ac.kr/articles/JPCM_0953-8984_26_33_335501.pdf. Section 3, printed p.2 and figure 1(b): Dirac point below the Fermi energy
The crop alone does not uniquely fix an absolute Fermi energy; the source-supported relative value and the conditional axis reading should be distinguished.Two atomic orbitals. In the linear combination of atomic orbitals approximation, use , where the two basis functions are localized atomic orbitals. Projecting onto each orbital gives the generalized eigenvalue problemHere the scalar overlap in the matrix is , while . Normalization requires , with now denoting the full overlap matrix. For equivalent real orbitals with diagonal energy , real hopping , and real overlap , the eigenstates and energies areFor the usual negative hopping convention, the symmetric combination is the lower bonding orbital and the antisymmetric combination is the higher antibonding orbital. In an orthonormal approximation, and the result reduces to a two-by-two Hermitian matrix eigenproblem.
Hybridized bands. At each , take the two Bloch basis states to be orthonormal, as implicit in the stated band model, and write . The Hamiltonian isFor , the eigenvalue condition isso . Thus band hybridization givesFor nonzero , a convenient explicit normalized pair of eigenstates isA phase convention can make real, but the eigenvalues depend only on its modulus. These are exact within the truncated two-band model, and approximate as a description of a material.
Dispersions and limits. For , the parabola crosses the flat band atFor the crossing is avoided, with a direct hybridization gap at . The lower and upper branches exchange orbital character through this avoided crossing. At the origin their energies areso for the small- expansions areAt large , where ,The lower branch approaches from below and becomes flat; the upper branch approaches the free-electron parabola from above. At zero coupling the unsorted orbital bands remain exactly flat and parabolic. Sorting them by energy instead gives and , which cross at without mixing.
Fermi wavevector and velocity. A partially occupied perfectly flat band has chemical potential . Thus before mixing, the occupied broad band has radius defined above. For spin degeneracy two, its particle density is ; equal population of the flat sector gives total density .
For any nonzero mixing, at finite , while . Moreover increases monotonically. At zero temperature and this fixed density, a single occupied sphere in the lower branch therefore accommodates all particles, and the upper branch is empty. Fermi-volume conservation in two hybridized electron bands givesThe new radius is about larger than the old broad-band radius. The strictly flat uncoupled band has no uniquely determined Fermi radius of its own; its prescribed population is what enters the count.
The radial group velocity is . Differentiating the exact dispersion givesAt , put , so . Relative to the original broad-band Fermi velocity ,Expanding for gives the flat-band hybridization Fermi-velocity suppressionThe coefficient is about . The enlarged occupied volume coexists with a small velocity because the new Fermi surface lies on the almost-flat part of the lower branch. This result assumes fixed particle density, sufficient available states before any Brillouin zone boundary, and temperature low enough to resolve energy differences of order . The limit at a fixed nonzero temperature need not give this sharp redistribution. Giving the narrow band a finite dispersion can also leave both pockets occupied, so the result is specific to the ideal model.
Energy and momentum measurement. In angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, monochromatic photons illuminate a clean surface in vacuum, and an electron energy analyzer measures the outgoing kinetic energies and emission directions. Measuring both gives the occupied electronic band structure, rather than only a momentum-integrated distribution of removal energies.
Choose a common energy reference for initial and final states. Let be the initial electron energy, the Fermi energy, and the vacuum level immediately outside the sample. The binding energy is . For a direct emission event without additional losses, conservation of energy givesHere the work function is the energy from the Fermi level to the local vacuum. The initial and final energies are total single-electron energies on the same scale, while is measured above vacuum. The diagram illustrates each interval independently.
Neglecting ultraviolet photon momentum, photoemission momentum conversion giveswhere is measured from the surface normal. Parallel crystal momentum is conserved modulo a surface reciprocal lattice vector; the surface breaks perpendicular translation symmetry. A three-dimensional sample therefore generally needs a final-state model to infer perpendicular momentum. The stated two-dimensional sheet avoids that ambiguity. The kinetic energy used in this formula is the sample-vacuum value; if the analyzer and sample have different work functions, their contact potential must be included when converting the analyzer's reading, as in photoelectron binding energy reference.
Spectral information. Define and the electron spectral function by . In the sudden approximation, the basic photoemission intensity and spectral function relation isbefore instrumental broadening and background are included. Here is the Fermi-Dirac distribution, and is the transition matrix element. The electron removal spectral function contains the occupied part of the spectrum. In a noninteracting band it has a delta peak at the band energy; interactions shift and broaden peaks and can add incoherent weight. Thus peak trajectories reveal dispersion, while line shapes can constrain lifetimes after resolution effects are accounted for. Dividing by known matrix and occupation factors can estimate where those factors are appreciable; intensity alone is not identical to , and a missing peak can reflect a matrix-element suppression. States well above are not accessible to ordinary low-temperature photoemission.
Photoemission energy accounting and qualitative upper valence-band dispersion
. Original schematic energy diagram and illustrative nearest-neighbour graphene pi-band curves. The left panel labels every requested energy and energy interval. The right panel shows an ideal two-dimensional pi band with hopping , not a fit or reproduction of the measured graphite spectra; other occupied orbital bands are omitted. Details.Two independent band-structure probes. First, the de Haas-van Alphen effect measures oscillatory magnetization as Landau levels cross the Fermi level when a magnetic field changes. The inverse-field frequency iswhere is an extremal Fermi surface cross-sectional area perpendicular to the field. Changing field orientation maps its shape. This reveals the momentum-space geometry of occupied bands; the related Shubnikov-de Haas effect measures oscillatory resistance.
Second, absorption or reflectance spectroscopy detects interband transitions. Photon energies at absorption edges and peaks constrain the band gap and interband energy differences. For a direct band gap, negligible photon momentum selects approximately vertical transitions in the band diagram, weighted by the joint density of states and transition matrix elements. An indirect transition needs a phonon to carry the extra crystal momentum. These measurements provide evidence beyond a free-electron parabola, although an optical spectrum alone does not reconstruct every band's dispersion.
Reading the graphite spectra. For each direction, follow a moving peak through successive angles and convert each peak's own kinetic energy to ; angle is not itself proportional to momentum over this wide range. The prominent dispersing valence feature starts at roughly – binding energy near and moves towards lower binding energy as increases. Along it approaches the Fermi level at the corner, then turns back to larger binding energy on continuing beyond the corner. Along it reaches a finite minimum binding energy of roughly – near the edge midpoint and turns back; it does not reach the Fermi level there. Additional deeper peaks describe other occupied valence branches, with visibility varying across the spectra.
A useful qualitative description is the upper occupied band of the nearest-neighbour model of graphene: . It rises from at to zero at , but only to at . The schematic curve in the figure captures those two different behaviours. It is not a full multi-orbital assignment or a quantitative fit to graphite, whose deeper valence features are also visible in the supplied spectra.
Angle needed to reach the corner. The corner's parallel wavevector isUse the near-zero binding energy of the upper valence band at that point. With the sample work function interpreted as the stated separation below vacuum,HenceThe energy and angle readings in the PDF are approximate. If a peak at the corner were instead assigned a small binding energy , the estimate becomesFor – this gives about –, consistent with the near-Fermi feature in that angular range. Substituting the full photon energy for the kinetic energy would omit the work-function cost and underestimate the required angle.
For a spherical Fermi surface inside a primitive cubic lattice zone, the shortest reciprocal vector has magnitude . The nearest translated Fermi sphere is separated by the electron-phonon Umklapp thresholdA phonon of this wavevector can connect nearly opposite-velocity Fermi states using , transferring reciprocal-lattice momentum to the crystal and efficiently relaxing electrical current. With the supplied sound speed, its thermal scale isFor such phonons have exponentially small occupation. As they become populated, Umklapp scattering can make the electrical conductivity fall rapidly. Lower-energy normal scattering and residual disorder still give resistance below this scale; this is a crossover estimate, not a sharp transition. The numerical estimate extrapolates the linear acoustic dispersion to and assumes the spherical Fermi surface implicit in giving one .
Using alone as the phonon wavevector misses this mechanism: direct backscattering would need , beyond the first-zone edge along this direction, while the reciprocal-lattice transfer permits it with .
As changes, each quantized orbit area grows linearly with field while the Fermi surface cross-section stays approximately fixed. Landau energies repeatedly cross the Fermi energy, making the density of states there oscillate. If the relevant extremal orbit has area , its crossings satisfyThus the oscillations are periodic in inverse field rather than field. In three dimensions integration over longitudinal momentum makes extremal cross-sections dominate.
One observable is the de Haas-van Alphen effect: the field-dependent occupation changes the electronic free energy, so its field derivative, the magnetization, oscillates. The corresponding oscillations of longitudinal electrical resistance are the Shubnikov-de Haas effect. Both probe Fermi-surface geometry.
For one conduction electron per atom, let be the atom density. State counting in a Bloch band gives the Fermi wavevector . The Debye model preserves the three vibrational modes per atom by a spherical Debye wavevector cutoff , soBoth wavevectors are of order the inverse atomic spacing. The numerical factor uses the spherical Debye approximation; a real zone boundary and the largest-frequency mode depend on direction and branch. Because , short-wavelength acoustic phonons can scatter Fermi surface electrons through substantial angles. For nearly elastic scattering within a spherical Fermi surface,Near room temperature, when a substantial fraction of the phonon spectrum is occupied, electron-phonon scattering is often the main source of electrical resistance. For , the phonon population and scattering rate are approximately proportional to , giving , and roughly constant when the Wiedemann-Franz law holds.
For small-angle electron-phonon transport at low temperature, thermally active acoustic modes instead haveThey predominantly scatter forward. The factor makes such collisions inefficient at relaxing an electrical current, while a phonon energy of order can still substantially change an electron's thermal excitation. Heat-current relaxation therefore need not share the charge-current relaxation time. In the clean three-dimensional acoustic-phonon model this gives but , so the phonon-limited electrical resistivity scales as and . These laws describe the regime before residual elastic scattering takes over; at sufficiently low temperature impurities give nearly constant residual resistivity and , restoring the usual Lorenz number.[ref]
https://home.itp.ac.ru/~grigorev/LectureSlides/MetalsLecture2.pdf. Electron-phonon scattering: distinct low-temperature thermal and electrical transport relaxation rates
Phonons also transport heat themselves, with . At low temperature their population decreases and their phonon mean free path can become boundary- or defect-limited. At higher temperature Umklapp scattering can relax the phonon heat current. Such lattice conduction is an additional contribution, not the quantity constrained by the electronic Wiedemann-Franz law.
Let the common uncoupled Fermi wavevector be . Equal carrier densities imply equal Fermi surface volumes, and hence equal radii for the spherical spin-degenerate electron pockets. The conserved total density isIf hybridisation leaves only one occupied electron-like band, state counting givesThis is the familiar single-large-Fermi-surface answer. It requires the other hybridised band to be empty.
For finite heavy-band mass, that conclusion does not follow from an arbitrary nonzero coupling. At sufficiently small , the upper band still has an occupied pocket, so there are two Fermi momenta, not one. The exact fixed-density statement is Fermi-volume conservation in two hybridized electron bands:For an explicit weak-coupling check, write , , with , and enforce the uncoupled equality at : , . Put and . The Fermi-surface equation isAt fixed density , givingFor arbitrary coupling, put . The roots of the same characteristic equation, before discarding unoccupied pockets, areChoose the chemical potential so that . This specifies the Fermi momentum of each pocket for any supplied curvatures and coupling.
The transition to one occupied pocket occurs at . Set ; at the transition the two squared radii are and zero. Their sum and product giveFor there are two pockets; for the only nonzero radius is . The outer radius grows continuously and the inner one shrinks. The nearly flat band limit can make depopulation occur at a small coupling, but the mass ratio or a single-surface assumption is needed to turn the question into a unique finite-coupling numerical change.
The constant term in the spin sum cancels. Linearizing the saddle point equation givesThe paramagnetic auxiliary-field curvature isConsequently the Stoner criterion for the loss of local paramagnetic stability isThe printed uses energy measured from the Fermi level. For a smooth density of states, becomes a narrow unit-area peak at ; a singular density of states or appreciable temperature requires the integral form. The curvature establishes local instability, not the order or location of every possible thermodynamic transition.
With exact spin-rotation symmetry, itinerant ferromagnetism selects a magnetization direction. The two broken transverse generators form one quadratic type-B Goldstone boson, a long-wave ferromagnetic magnon with . Longitudinal amplitude motion is not symmetry-protected to be gapless. In a metallic ordered state, particle-hole excitations remain near each surviving exchange-split Fermi surface; these are distinct from the collective magnon. The itinerant spin-flip particle-hole continuum starts at exchange scale at in this simple mean-field spectrum, while its finite- boundaries differ. Spin anisotropy, spin-orbit coupling or an external field can gap the transverse mode; none is present in the stated model.
Consider a conventional spin-singlet, weak-coupling, three-dimensional superconductor. Set in the microscopic action and restore electromagnetic units below. An attraction in an energy shell about the Fermi surface gives a Grassmann actionThe attractive sign permits pairing even when the single-particle Fermi gas is otherwise stable. A complex Hubbard–Stratonovich transformation introduces a pair field proportional at the saddle to . The action is then quadratic in fermions. Integrating them out gives the BCS pairing-field effective actionHere the trace uses one independent Nambu spinor pairing block; a fully doubled particle-hole representation instead carries its corresponding one-half factor. At a uniform saddle the Bogoliubov--de Gennes Hamiltonian can be written asThe negative branch describes the paired vacuum; excitations are Bogoliubov quasiparticles mixing particles and holes. Extremizing the effective action givesThe physical cutoff or a renormalized interaction is part of the microscopic model; an unregulated contact integral must not be used indiscriminately. With constant density of states per spin and shell half-width , the zero-temperature weak-coupling solution is . The exponentially small scale follows from the logarithmic pairing susceptibility of states near the Fermi surface. For this ideal weak-coupling model, . The microscopic theory relates the gap, pairing and thermodynamic transition.[ref]
Theory of Superconductivity by John Bardeen and others. pp.1175–1177 and the energy-gap and finite-temperature developments
Close to a continuous transition, for fields varying slowly compared with microscopic scales, expand the effective action in powers and gradients of . Its static part is the Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity:The normalization of fixes the coefficients; here changes sign at . The uniform minimum has for , condensation free-energy density , and characteristic coherence-length scale . Above the transition the minimum is at zero. The quartic stabilization and gradient cost are precisely the ingredients of Landau theory for a complex order parameter. This controlled near-transition expansion supplies a bridge between microscopic BCS theory and macroscopic magnetic response; its coefficients and validity depend on the material and fluctuation regime.[ref]
Microscopic Derivation of the Ginzburg-Landau Equations in the Theory of Superconductivity by Lev Gor'kov. pp.1364–1367, microscopic expansion near the transition
Write . The radial fluctuation has positive local restoring curvature, whereas the phase has no local potential in a neutral theory with global symmetry. Freezing the amplitude givesThe neutral case supports a gapless collective phase mode. In the charged case the electromagnetic field couples to this phase rigidity. Under and , the displayed combination is invariant. Locally choosing a gauge with constant phase leaves a quadratic term in . Varying the free energy gives the transverse London current and magnetic screening scale,Combining this relation with static Maxwell equations gives exponential field penetration, the Meissner effect. Single-valuedness of the pair field around a loop with negligible current gives flux in units . These are gauge-invariant physical consequences of the condensate stiffness.
For the dynamics, the neutral phase and density mode is reorganized by the Coulomb interaction and the dynamical electromagnetic field. In a bulk three-dimensional system the long-wave longitudinal mode has a plasma gap, rather than remaining the neutral sound mode. This is the Anderson-Higgs mechanism in a superconductor: a phase coordinate becomes part of the electromagnetic collective response instead of surviving as an independent massless physical particle. Local gauge transformations are redundancies of the description, so a literal breaking of a local redundancy is not an observable. Phase coherence, current response and magnetic screening provide the physical statements.[ref]
Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass by Philip Warren Anderson. pp.439–442, plasma oscillations and the charged versus neutral matter spectrum
A static Landau functional alone cannot determine that full dynamical spectrum. A two-dimensional film, for example, need not have the same long-wave plasma dispersion as a bulk charged system. Nor does a positive radial curvature automatically guarantee a sharp Higgs amplitude resonance: coupling to quasiparticles and other modes can damp it. The chosen mean-field phase is also a thermodynamic symmetry-breaking description; an isolated finite system can be formulated with definite particle number. The microscopic pairing saddle, the near-transition Landau expansion and the electromagnetic Anderson-Higgs response describe successive scales of the same superconducting state, with distinct assumptions at each step.
Let be the real-space area and use , with . There is one state per momentum cell, since the fermions are spinless. An annulus between and contains states. Near the Fermi surface, the quasiparticle dispersion relation has , so the total density of states isThe density of states per unit area and the occupied-state count are, respectively,In particular, . No factor of two for spin degeneracy is present. This counts Landau quasiparticle levels, so it is not multiplied by the quasiparticle residue of the microscopic particle Green's function.
Within a stable normal Fermi liquid, the low-energy states are described by long-lived Landau quasiparticles and holes in a thin shell about the Fermi surface; the Pauli exclusion principle suppresses their decay. Expanding the energy about the equilibrium occupations gives the one-quasiparticle dispersion relation at first order and the interaction between occupation changes at second order, namely the Landau quasiparticle energy functional. For a smooth interaction, radial deviations in that interaction may be neglected at leading order, leaving its angular dependence; higher occupation terms contribute higher powers of the small shell thickness. Collective occupation deformations are included in the same description. The sufficiency claim is conditional on the normal Fermi liquid regime, and on supplementing this static energy functional with dynamics when required: it is not a description of arbitrary low-energy phases such as a superconductor or non-Fermi liquid.
Use the total density of states and from part (b). In the paper's double-sum convention, has units of energy and scales as . Define its first angular moment byThis convention matters: the Landau quasiparticle energy functional written with an explicit instead uses the intensive kernel .
At zero temperature, the displayed functional is the change in ; a true Galilean boost preserves , so . For a radial displacement , the first term in the Landau quasiparticle energy functional becomesThe oriented radial integral also works for negative : removing occupied levels below the chemical potential costs positive energy. Substituting and using givesThe exact second-order correction to the boundary is unnecessary here because the unperturbed excitation energy vanishes on the Fermi surface; it changes this term only beyond quadratic order. It must nevertheless be understood when identifying with a fixed-particle number energy change.
For the quadratic interaction term, the first-order occupation change alone suffices. The radial Dirac delta function integrals givePut . The remaining angular integral usesso only the first cosine component of the interaction survives. Since ,Adding both contributions and matching the bare-mass result of part (a) yields the two-dimensional Landau effective-mass relation:Equivalently, using the density of states per unit area ,If dimensionless Landau parameters are defined through the Fourier series , then andDefining the cosine expansion with an extra factor of two would instead absorb that factor into ; the angular-integral formula above fixes the convention unambiguously. The physical content is that interaction changes accompanying a moving Fermi sea compensate the renormalized quasiparticle velocity, so the total boost energy is governed by the bare mass. For an interaction independent of angle, and this consistency condition requires .
Momentum-resolved photoemission and directional tunneling can map the magnitude and nodes of the cuprate gap. Low-temperature heat capacity, thermal transport and penetration-depth measurements constrain the low-energy quasiparticle spectrum. These probes do not all determine the relative sign of the gap. A phase-sensitive test of d-wave pairing uses Josephson interference between differently oriented crystal regions. In the tricrystal half-flux experiment, a superconducting film crosses three designed grain boundaries; a frustrated ring can produce a half-flux signal detected with a scanning SQUID. Unfrustrated geometries supply controls. This probes phase structure beyond merely finding a V-shaped tunneling spectrum.[ref]
Pairing symmetry and flux quantization in a tricrystal superconducting ring by C. C. Tsuei and others. 1994, tricrystal geometry and flux measurement
For the ideal nearest-neighbor square lattice at one electron per site including both spins, particle-hole symmetry puts the chemical potential at zero. The two requested cuts areThe first runs from at the zone center to zero at ; the diagonal cut crosses zero at . The Fermi surface obeys , giving the diamond in the first Brillouin zone.
Half-filled square-lattice band cuts, diamond Fermi surface and anisotropic nodal quasiparticle contours
. Details. Near the specified node define andExpanding giveswhere and . ThereforeThere are four such nodes. An energy contour about one node encloses momentum area . Counting all four nodes and two independent spin quasiparticles, with one state per of momentum area per unit real-space area, gives the positive-excitation count and nodal quasiparticle density of states in a two-dimensional d-wave superconductorThis counts thermally excitable Bogoliubov modes, including particle-like and hole-like excitations, not the electron-addition spectral density alone. That distinction prevents a factor-of-two ambiguity. It is a per-layer result; dividing by the layer spacing gives the corresponding volume density in the independent-layer approximation.
The thermal energy density above its zero-temperature value follows from Fermi occupation:ThusThis clean nodal contribution assumes small compared with the scale over which linearization fails; impurity states and other excitations can add further terms.
In the vortex state, each flux quantum occupies area of order , so . Outside a core of radius , the phase flow has magnitude in the simple circular-cell estimate, with and condensed-pair mass . Its cell average isThe signed vector average can vanish around a vortex; the relevant quantity is a typical magnitude or Doppler shift, not a net transport velocity. Flow shifts nodal energies by order . Because the zero-field nodal density of states is linear in energy, averaging the magnitude of these shifts produces a residual density of states proportional to . The resulting Volovik effect givesThis is the clean semiclassical nodal regime, at temperatures below the field-induced Doppler scale and in an appropriate mixed-state field range. Core states, disorder, Zeeman splitting and screening can modify it. Its replacement by a square root of applied field additionally assumes the mean induction tracks that field away from the lower-critical-field onset; it is not an exact all-field law.







