Moment of Inertia of Interacting Many-Body Fermion Systems

Abstract

It is shown that the moment of inertia of a noninteracting many-body fermion system moving under periodic boundary conditions has the classical or rigid value when calculated on the "cranking" model of Inglis. By investigating the analogous "pushing" case for the inertial mass we show that the rigid moment can be associated with rigid rotation in spite of apparent surface currents. The effect of particle-particle forces is investigated in the lowest order of perturbation theory. The terms corresponding to a level shift or effective mass are just compensated by other terms and there is no change in the moment of inertia. The possible general validity of these results and their consequence is discussed.