Conformal Field Theory on the Fermi Surface

Abstract

The Fermi surface may be usefully viewed as a collection of 1+1 dimensional chiral conformal field theories. This approach permits straightforward calculation of many anomalous ground state properties of the Fermi gas including entanglement entropy and number fluctuations. The 1+1 dimensional picture also generalizes to finite temperature and the presence of interactions. Finally, I argue that the low energy entanglement structure of Fermi liquid theory is universal, depending only on the geometry of the interacting Fermi surface.