Quantizing Bosonized Fermi Surfaces

Abstract

Bosonization describes Fermi surface dynamics in terms of a collective field that lives on a part of phase space. While sensible semiclassically, the challenge of treating such a field quantum mechanically has prevented bosonization from providing as powerful a nonperturbative tool as in one dimension. We show that general Fermi surfaces can be exactly described by a particular $N\to \infty$ limit of a $U(N)_1$ WZW model, with a tower of irrelevant corrections. This matrix-valued description encodes the noncommutative nature of phase space, and its (solvable) strongly coupled dynamics resolves the naive overcounting of degrees of freedom of the collective field without the need to cut the Fermi surface into patches. This approach furthermore provides a quantitative tool to systematically study power-law corrections to Fermi surface dynamics.