A magnetic field quantizes closed semiclassical orbits into Landau levels. Their passage through the Fermi energy modulates the density of states and scattering, producing Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations of resistivity. The fundamental frequency for a regular extremal orbit perpendicular to the field is
Thus two distinct fundamentals ordinarily identify two inequivalent extremal areas, rather than two arbitrary points or two spin directions automatically giving two different geometric areas.
The particle-hole equality of tetragonal extremal orbit areas is a special constraint of the exact half-filled nearest-neighbor band stated here. For , its regular closed endpoint sections are the electron contour at and the hole contour at described in b. Translation changes the sign of both cosines and maps one enclosed pocket onto the other. Their areas are equal. Direct integration gives
Consequently this bare model predicts
not two distinct regular fundamental frequencies. The intermediate contour is a separatrix with a divergent cyclotron period, not another ordinary smooth extremal pocket to insert into the Onsager formula. The larger occupied-area slice at is the complement of a hole pocket on the Brillouin torus; counting that complement as a second enclosed planar orbit would give a spurious ratio.
For comparison, an additional small- parabolic approximation would replace the exact surface by and suggest a rough belly-to-neck ratio . That approximation is uncontrolled at half filling and erases the actual topology; it cannot be asserted as an exact prediction of the supplied cosine band. The observation of genuinely different frequencies in a real material therefore needs further information, such as longer-range hopping, a departure from half filling, extra bands, symmetry breaking or a resolved spin-dependent effect. The universal area-ratio inference is valid, but a nonunit numerical ratio is not determined consistently by the complete stated band assumptions alone.[ref]