Bosonic Collective Excitations in Fermi Gases

Abstract

Hartree-Fock theory has been justified as a mean-field approximation for fermionic systems. However, it suffers from some defects in predicting physical properties, making necessary a theory of quantum correlations. Recently, bosonization of many-body correlations has been rigorously justified as an upper bound on the correlation energy at high density with weak interactions. We review the bosonic approximation, deriving an effective Hamiltonian. We then show that for systems with Coulomb interaction this effective theory predicts collective excitations (plasmons) in accordance with the random phase approximation of Bohm and Pines, and with experimental observation.