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Abstract Integrals of products of Bessel functions exhibit an intriguing feature: they may vanish identically, not due to an orthogonality property, but rather when certain conditions on the parameters specifying the integrand are satisfied. We provide a physical interpretation of this feature in the context of both single-particle and many-body properties of electrons on a lattice (“Bloch electrons“), namely, in terms of their density of states and umklapp scattering rate. (In an umklapp event, the change in the momentum of two colliding electrons is equal to a reciprocal lattice vector, which gives rise to a finite resistivity due to electron-electron interaction.) In this context, the vanishing of an integral follows simply from the condition that either the density of states vanishes due to the electron energy lying outside the band in which free propagation of electron waves is allowed, or that an umklapp process is kinematically forbidden due to the Fermi surface being smaller than a critical value.