Bosonization of nonrelativistic fermions on a circle: Tomonaga's problem revisited

We use the recently developed tools for an exact bosonization of a finite number N of nonrelativistic fermions to discuss the classic Tomonaga problem. In the case of noninteracting fermions, the bosonized Hamiltonian naturally splits into an O(N) piece and an O(1) piece. We show that in the large-N and low-energy limit, the O(N) piece in the Hamiltonian describes a massless relativistic boson, while the O(1) piece gives rise to cubic self-interactions of the boson. At finite N and high energies, the low-energy effective description breaks down and the exact bosonized Hamiltonian must be used. We also comment on the connection between the Tomonaga problem and pure Yang-Mills theory on a cylinder. In the dual context of baby universes and multiple black holes in string theory, we point out that the O(N) piece in our bosonized Hamiltonian provides a simple understanding of the origin of two different kinds of nonperturbative O(e-N) corrections to the black hole partition function