Many-body formalism for thermally excited wave packets: A way to connect the quantum regime to the classical regime

Free classical particles have well-defined momentum and position, while free quantum particles have well-defined momentum but a position fully delocalized over the sample volume. We develop a many-body formalism based on wave-packet operators that connects these two limits, the thermal energy being distributed between the state spatial extension and its thermal excitation. The corresponding mixed quantum-classical states, which render the Boltzmann operator diagonal, are the physically relevant states when the temperature is finite. The formulation of many-body Hamiltonians in terms of these thermally excited wave packets and the resulting effective scatterings is provided.