Geometric Phase for Fermionic Quasiparticles Scattering by Disgyration in Superfluids

We consider a Volovik's analog model for description of a topological defects in a superfluid and we investigate the scattering of quasiparticles in this background. The analog of the gravitational Aharonov-Bohm in this system is found. An analysis of this problem employing loop variables is considered and corroborates for the existence of the Aharonov-Bohm effect in this system. The results presented here may be used to study the Aharonov-Bohm effect in superconductors.Comment: 7 pages, to appear in Europhys. Let

Semiclassical Series from Path Integrals

We derive the semiclassical series for the partition function in Quantum Statistical Mechanics (QSM) from its path integral representation. Each term of the series is obtained explicitly from the (real) minima of the classical action. The method yields a simple derivation of the exact result for the harmonic oscillator, and an accurate estimate of ground-state energy and specific heat for a single-well quartic anharmonic oscillator. As QSM can be regarded as finite temperature field theory at a point, we make use of Feynman diagrams to illustrate the non-perturbative character of the series: it contains all powers of $\hbar$ and graphs with any number of loops; the usual perturbative series corresponds to a subset of the diagrams of the semiclassical series. We comment on the application of our results to other potentials, to correlation functions and to field theories in higher dimensions.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures. References update