Electronic Transport at Low Temperatures: Diagrammatic Approach

D. Belitz, T. R. Kirkpatrick

Published 2008-11-28Version 1

We prove that a diagrammatic evaluation of the Kubo formula for the electronic transport conductivity due the exchange of bosonic excitations, in the usual conserving ladder approximation, yields a result consistent with the Boltzmann equation. In particular, we show that an uncontrolled approximation that has been used to solve the integral equation for the vertex function is unnecessary. An exact solution of the integral equation yields the same asymptotic low-temperature behavior as the approximate one, albeit with a different prefactor, and agrees with the temperature dependence of the Boltzmann solution. Examples considered are electron scattering from acoustic phonons, and from helimagnons in helimagnets.