Quantum Nonlinear Bosonization of Fermi surfaces

Luca Delacretaz investigates a nonperturbative description of Fermi surfaces, whose many low-energy excitations, collective modes, entanglement and possible non-Fermi-liquid behavior are difficult to handle with conventional field theory. Bosonization describes their dynamics using a collective field in phase space, but quantizing that field has been a longstanding obstacle beyond one dimension. The talk presents an exact description through a particular large-N limit of a level-one U(N) Wess–Zumino–Witten model, with a hierarchy of irrelevant corrections. Matrix degrees of freedom capture noncommutative phase space, and solvable strong-coupling dynamics removes the apparent excess of collective-field modes without dividing the Fermi surface into patches.