Narrow Results

For a two-dimensional, weakly coupled system of fermions at temperature zero, one principal ingredient used to control the composition of the associated renormalization group maps is the careful counting of the number of quartets of sectors that are consistent with conservation of momentum. A similar counting argument is made to show that particle–particle ladders are irrelevant in the case of an asymmetric Fermi curve.

We consider many-fermion systems with singular Fermi surfaces, which contain Van Hove points where the gradient of the band function k ↦ e(k) vanishes. In a previous paper, we have treated the case of spatial dimension d ≥ 3. In this paper, we focus on the more singular case d = 2 and establish properties of the fermionic self-energy to all orders in perturbation theory. We show that there is an asymmetry between the spatial and frequency derivatives of the self-energy. The derivative with respect to the Matsubara frequency diverges at the Van Hove points, but, surprisingly, the self-energy is C¹ in the spatial momentum to all orders in perturbation theory, provided the Fermi surface is curved away from the Van Hove points. In a prototypical example, the second spatial derivative behaves similarly to the first frequency derivative. We discuss the physical significance of these findings.