Fermi-liquid theory and Pomeranchuk instabilities: fundamentals and new developments

TL;DR

This review discusses the foundational principles of Fermi-liquid theory, emphasizing five key identities derived from conservation laws, and explores recent developments including constraints on Pomeranchuk instabilities and their implications.

Contribution

It clarifies the fundamental identities of FL theory, derives constraints on instabilities, and provides diagrammatic derivations and examples of susceptibility calculations.

Findings

Constraints prevent certain Pomeranchuk instabilities.

Effective mass and quasiparticle residue are expressed via exact vertex functions.

Diagrammatic derivations illustrate susceptibility relations.

Abstract

This paper is a short review on the foundations and recent advances in the microscopic Fermi-liquid (FL) theory. We demonstrate that this theory is built on five identities, which follow from conservation of total charge (particle number), spin, and momentum in a translationally and $SU(2)$-invariant FL. These identities allows one to express the effective mass and quasiparticle residue in terms of an exact vertex function and also impose constraints on the "quasiparticle" and "incoherent" (or "low-energ" and "high-energy") contributions to the observable quantities. Such constraints forbid certain Pomeranchuk instabilities of a FL, e.g., towards phases with order parameters that coincide with charge and spin currents. We provide diagrammatic derivations of these constraints and of the general (Leggett) formula for the susceptibility in arbitrary angular momentum channel, and illustrate the general relations through simple examples treated in the perturbation theory.