Fermi window 2026-10-20
The Fermi window measures sensitivity of occupation to energy near the chemical potential. It is positive, even about , has width of order , and integrates to one over the full energy line. Its centred variance is . A band restricted to nonnegative energy contains weight instead of exactly one; extending to the full line is exponentially accurate when . At zero temperature the window tends to a Dirac delta function at the chemical potential.
For noninteracting fermions with density of states , define . The grand potential is , where has derivative . Integrating by parts twice gives the title expression, since and upper boundary terms vanish for ordinary polynomially growing densities of states. The Fermi window therefore thermally averages the zero-temperature grand potential as a function of trial Fermi energy.
Let . Each independent fermion orbital is either empty or occupied once, so its grand partition factor is . Multiplying factors and taking the logarithm gives
Since , this is the requested form. Spin or other orbital degeneracy is already included in .
For the Fermi-window convolution of the grand potential, define
Direct differentiation gives . The supplied PDF hint has the opposite sign; using that sign would contradict its grand-potential formula. Integrating twice with and vanishing upper boundary terms,
At zero temperature , confirming .
Use the source's implicit unit normalization of the constant density of states; restoring a constant baseline multiplies the following potentials by . For the sinusoidal density of states, direct integration gives
Physical nonnegative density of states requires . Write and . The Fermi window
is even, with full-line moments , and . The last integral follows, for example, by expanding on into its alternating exponential series. When , extending the lower integration limit to introduces only exponentially small band-edge corrections. The supplied Fourier transform gives
The odd sine term vanishes. Substitution proves
The thermal damping of a sinusoidal density of states is therefore in the full oscillatory potential. The requested ratio instead concerns the thermal change . Its oscillatory thermal-change amplitude ratio is
For positive it decreases smoothly from the limit to zero:
At exactly both thermal changes vanish; the quoted value is their limiting ratio. The amplitude is the envelope in chemical potential. At a particular fixed , the signed contribution ratio has in place of ; at an oscillation node the actual oscillatory contribution is zero. The large- behaviour still requires , so the useful range is .
Figure 1. . Original curves distinguish exponential damping of the full oscillatory grand potential from the algebraically decreasing oscillatory-to-smooth amplitude ratio in its thermal change. The right curve is divided by the stipulated oscillation amplitude. Details.