Statistical Mechanics of an Assembly of Quasiparticles

Abstract

Low-lying excitations in a liquid or a solid are considered to have a long lifetime and to obey the Bose or Fermi statistics. They will be called "quasiparticles" in general. The low-lying energy levels of the system are considered to be characterized by a set of occupation numbers of the quasiparticles. The expressions for the grand partition function and the distribution function (the average occupation number) of the quasiparticles have the same structure as that for the classical lattice gas, under a nonuniform external field and with two-, three-,..., body interactions. Therefore the virial expansion formula for the classical lattice gas can be applied to the system of quasiparticles. The result is simplified by assuming that the energy correction due to the simultaneous excitations of two, three,..., $n$ quasiparticles are of $O\left(V^{-1\mathrm{}}\right),O\left(V^{-2\mathrm{}}\right),\cdots ,O\left(V^{-n+1\mathrm{}}\right)$, respectively, where $V$ is the volume of the system. The resulting expression for the distribution function of the quasiparticles is either a Fermi or a Bose distribution function with an effective energy. The expression for the entropy in terms of the distribution function is the same as that for an ideal gas. This shows that Landau's formula for the distribution function of quasiparticles for a Fermi liquid is valid under conditions which are more general and more practical than those given by Landau. Finally the situation in the Husimi-Temperley model is discussed in comparison with that in the Ising model from the point of view of the present formulation.