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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

where

is the action of the non-interacting system; while the action of the interacting system is

with

Hubbard-Stratonovich Transformation

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

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

Here the number resembles the pre-factor in the previous example. Rewriting the potential in momentum space, this identity allows to convert the partition function. This is done by a shift of the field

The partition function, as introduced at the beginning of this chapter, simplifies thereby to