Theory of Electrical Resistivity

Abstract

A new general expression for the electrical resistivity of a substance is obtained with the help of projection techniques with the Liouville equation as the point of departure. No many-body detail is sacrificed and the "${\lambda }^{2}t$ limit" is not invoked. The first-order result in a perturbation expansion in orders of the scattering is presented in explicit form and shown to have a simple and physical appearance. It is also shown to reduce to the well-known Boltzmann expressions for simple cases.