Quasiparticle Effective Mass of the Three-Dimensional Fermi Liquid by Quantum Monte Carlo

According to Landau's Fermi liquid theory, the main properties of the quasiparticle excitations of an electron gas are embodied in the effective mass m*, which determines the energy of a single quasiparticle, and the Landau interaction function, which indicates how the energy of a quasiparticle is modified by the presence of other quasiparticles. This simple paradigm underlies most of our current understanding of the physical and chemical behavior of metallic systems. The quasiparticle effective mass of the threedimensional homogeneous electron gas has been the subject of theoretical controversy, and there is a lack of experimental data. In this Letter, we deploy diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) methods to calculate m* as a function of density for paramagnetic and ferromagnetic three-dimensional homogeneous electron gases. The DMC results indicate that m* decreases when the density is reduced, especially in the ferromagnetic case. The DMC quasiparticle energy bands exclude the possibility of a reduction in the occupied bandwidth relative to that of the free-electron model at density parameter r(s) = 4, which corresponds to Na metal.

Automated summary

Landau's Fermi liquid theory explains the main properties of quasiparticle excitations in an electron gas, which are crucial for understanding the behavior of metallic systems. Diffusion Monte Carlo methods were used in this study to calculate the effective mass of three-dimensional homogeneous electron gases as a function of density, showing a decrease in effective mass at lower densities, especially in the case of ferromagnetism.