Talk:Phy5670

Collective Modes

Sound waves propagating through air or water are examples for collective modes. Such modes arise without broken symmetry of the system as ordinary gases and fluids don't brake any symmetry. Such waves have wavelengths that are very large compared to the distance between neighboring particles, which is the reason why we will look at very small wave vectors. An example for a collective mode in due to broken symmetry is a shear mode in a solid.

Remember that the partition function can be written as the Feynman path integral

$Z=\int D(c^{*},c)e^{-S},$

where

$S_{0}={\frac {1}{\beta }}\sum _{\omega _{n}}\sum _{k}(-i\omega _{n}+\epsilon _{n}-\mu )c_{k,\sigma }^{*}c_{k,\sigma }(\omega _{n})$

is the action of the non-interacting system; while the action of the interacting system is $S_{int}={\frac {1}{\beta }}\sum _{\Omega _{n}}{\frac {1}{L^{3}}}\sum _{q}V_{q}n_{-q}(-i\Omega _{n})n_{q}(i\Omega _{n})$

with $n_{q}(i\Omega _{n})={\frac {1}{\beta }}\sum _{\omega _{n}}\sum _{k}c_{k+q,\sigma }^{*}(i\omega _{n}+i\Omega _{n})c_{k,\sigma }(i\omega _{n})$

Hubbard-Stratonovich Transformation

The partition function can be calculated via the Hubbard-Stratonovich Transformation, which can be motivated by the one-dimensional integral

$1={\frac {1}{\sqrt {\pi a}}}\int \limits _{-\infty }^{\infty }dxe^{-{\frac {1}{a}}x^{2}},$

where the prefactor ${\sqrt {\pi a}}$ is simply the constant number that equals to the value of the integral. <\br> In the language of path integrals this implies

$1={\frac {1}{N}}\int D(\phi (r,\tau ))e^{-\int \limits _{0}^{\beta }d\tau \int d^{3}r\phi (r)V^{-1}(r-r')\phi (r')}.$

Here the number $N$ resembles the factor