Fermi liquid Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-18
Why can a strongly interacting liquid resemble a gas? Its low-energy excitations can be long-lived Landau quasiparticles near a Fermi surface. Normal liquid helium-3 motivates this Fermi liquid description: interactions survive in effective excitation energies and interactions.[ref]
Interacting one-dimensional fermion systems often form Luttinger liquids; non-Fermi liquids also occur in higher dimensions. A Cooper instability can produce a paired phase.[ref]
The Fermi-surface renormalization-group scaling below organizes the low-energy interactions; zero sound tests whether their collective dynamics survives even when collisions are rare.
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.