No Arabic abstract
Unconventional metallic states which do not support well defined single-particle excitations can arise near quantum phase transitions as strong quantum fluctuations of incipient order parameters prevent electrons from forming coherent quasiparticles. Although antiferromagnetic phase transitions occur commonly in correlated metals, understanding the nature of the strange metal realized at the critical point in layered systems has been hampered by a lack of reliable theoretical methods that take into account strong quantum fluctuations. We present a non-perturbative solution to the low-energy theory for the antiferromagnetic quantum critical metal in two spatial dimensions. Being a strongly coupled theory, it can still be solved reliably in the low-energy limit as quantum fluctuations are organized by a new control parameter that emerges dynamically. We predict the exact critical exponents that govern the universal scaling of physical observables at low temperatures.
We compute the scrambling rate at the antiferromagnetic (AFM) quantum critical point, using the fixed point theory of Phys. Rev. X $boldsymbol{7}$, 021010 (2017). At this strongly coupled fixed point, there is an emergent control parameter $w ll 1$ that is a ratio of natural parameters of the theory. The strong coupling is unequally felt by the two degrees of freedom: the bosonic AFM collective mode is heavily dressed by interactions with the electrons, while the electron is only marginally renormalized. We find that the scrambling rates act as a measure of the degree of integrability of each sector of the theory: the Lyapunov exponent for the boson $lambda_L^{(B)} sim mathcal O(sqrt{w}) ,k_B T/hbar$ is significantly larger than the fermion one $lambda_L^{(F)} sim mathcal O(w^2) ,k_B T/hbar$, where $T$ is the temperature. Although the interaction strength in the theory is of order unity, the larger Lyapunov exponent is still parametrically smaller than the universal upper bound of $lambda_L=2pi k_B T/hbar$. We also compute the spatial spread of chaos by the boson operator, whose low-energy propagator is highly non-local. We find that this non-locality leads to a scrambled region that grows exponentially fast, giving an infinite butterfly velocity of the chaos front, a result that has also been found in lattice models with long-range interactions.
We study the antiferromagnetic quantum critical metal in $3-epsilon$ space dimensions by extending the earlier one-loop analysis [Sur and Lee, Phys. Rev. B 91, 125136 (2015)] to higher-loop orders. We show that the $epsilon$-expansion is not organized by the standard loop expansion, and a two-loop graph becomes as important as one-loop graphs due to an infrared singularity caused by an emergent quasilocality. This qualitatively changes the nature of the infrared (IR) fixed point, and the $epsilon$-expansion is controlled only after the two-loop effect is taken into account. Furthermore, we show that a ratio between velocities emerges as a small parameter, which suppresses a large class of diagrams. We show that the critical exponents do not receive corrections beyond the linear order in $epsilon$ in the limit that the ratio of velocities vanishes. The $epsilon$-expansion gives critical exponents which are consistent with the exact solution obtained in $0 < epsilon leq 1$.
We study the quantum criticality of the phase transition between the Dirac semimetal and the excitonic insulator in two dimensions. Even though the system has a semimetallic ground state, there are observable effects of excitonic pairing at finite temperatures and/or finite energies, provided that the system is in proximity to the excitonic insulating transition. To determine the quantum critical behavior, we consider three potentially important interactions, including the Yukawa coupling between Dirac fermions and the excitonic order parameter fluctuation, the long-range Coulomb interaction, and the disorder scattering. We employ the renormalization group technique to study how these interactions affect quantum criticality and also how they influence each other. We first investigate the Yukawa coupling in the clean limit, and show that it gives rise to typical non-Fermi liquid behavior. Adding random scalar potential to the system always turns such a non-Fermi liquid into a compressible diffusive metal. In comparison, the non-Fermi liquid behavior is further enhanced by random vector potential, but is nearly unaffected by random mass. Incorporating the Coulomb interaction may change the results qualitatively. In particular, the non-Fermi liquid state is protected by the Coulomb interaction for weak random scalar potential, and it becomes a diffusive metal only when random scalar potential becomes sufficiently strong. When random vector potential or random mass coexists with Yukawa coupling and Coulomb interaction, the system is a stable non-Fermi liquid state, with fermion velocities flowing to constants in the former case and being singularly renormalized in the latter case. These quantum critical phenomena can be probed by measuring observable quantities.
Recent sign-problem-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations of (2+1)-dimensional lattice quantum electrodynamics (QED$_3$) with $N_f$ flavors of fermions on the square lattice have found evidence of continuous quantum phase transitions between a critical phase and a gapped valence-bond-solid (VBS) phase for flavor numbers $N_f=4$, $6$, and $8$. We derive the critical theory for these transitions, the chiral $O(2)$ QED$_3$-Gross-Neveu model, and show that the latter is equivalent to the gauged Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. Using known large-$N_f$ results for the latter, we estimate the order parameter anomalous dimension and the correlation length exponent for the transitions mentioned above. We obtain large-$N_f$ results for the dimensions of fermion bilinear operators, in both the gauged and ungauged chiral $O(2)$ Gross-Neveu models, which respectively describe the long-distance power-law decay of two-particle correlation functions at the VBS transition in lattice QED$_3$ and the Kekule-VBS transition for correlated fermions on the honeycomb lattice.
We report a quantum Monte Carlo study of the phase transition between antiferromagnetic and valence-bond solid ground states in the square-lattice $S=1/2$ $J$-$Q$ model. The critical correlation function of the $Q$ terms gives a scaling dimension corresponding to the value $ u = 0.455 pm 0.002$ of the correlation-length exponent. This value agrees with previous (less precise) results from conventional methods, e.g., finite-size scaling of the near-critical order parameters. We also study the $Q$-derivatives of the Binder cumulants of the order parameters for $L^2$ lattices with $L$ up to $448$. The slope grows as $L^{1/ u}$ with a value of $ u$ consistent with the scaling dimension of the $Q$ term. There are no indications of runaway flow to a first-order phase transition. The mutually consistent estimates of $ u$ provide compelling support for a continuous deconfined quantum-critical point.