The effective gauge field action of a system of non-relativistic electrons.

We consider a system of free, non-relativistic electrons at zero temperature and positive density, coupled to an arbitrary, external electromagnetic vector potential,A. By integrating out the electron degrees of freedom we obtain the effective action forA. We show that, in the scaling limit, this effective action is quadratic inA and can be viewed as an integral over the Fermi sphere of effective actions of (1+1)-dimensional, chiral schwinger models. We use this result to elucidate Luther-Haldane bosonization of systems of non-relativistic electrons. We also study systems of weakly coupled interacting electrons for which the BCS channel is turned off. Using the quadratic dependence of the effective action onA, we show that, in the scaling limit, the RPA yields the dominant contribution.