Talk:Fermi gas
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The last paragraph is not quite true. It states that the Fermi gas neglects interactions by definition, so that the study of a Fermi gas reduces to the study of single particles. Even if elecron-electron interactions are neglected, the Pauli principle must be obeyed. Therefore the fermionic statistics makes the problem a bit more complicated than simply the study of single electrons. The constraint is that the total many-particle wavefunction needs to be antisymmetric under the interchange of any two of the electrons. This gives rise to the Fermi surface alluded to earlier in the article. If one was simply studying a single fermion, there would be no fermi surface. Therefore the study of many non-interacting electrons is not the same as studying one electron.
[edit] Rewrite
This article needs serious work. It needs more mathematical rigor in defining the properties of a Fermi gas. It should also lead into an introduction of band theory and the nearly free electron model, and link to the relevant articles (which looks like they could use work too...). We should be careful not to reproduce effort already done on the Fermi-Dirac statistics page, however, and simply reference those results. A more in-depth (but still brief) overview of the examples cited (neutron star, metals) would also be helpful.
I'll start work on this when I have time. Deklund 08:07, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
