No Arabic abstract
A long standing mystery of fundamental importance in correlated electron physics is to understand strange non-Fermi liquid metals that are seen in diverse quantum materials. A striking experimental feature of these metals is a resistivity that is linear in temperature ($T$). In this paper we ask what it takes to obtain such non-Fermi liquid physics down to zero temperature in a translation invariant metal. If in addition the full frequency ($omega$) dependent conductivity satisfies $omega/T$ scaling, we argue that the $T$-linear resistivity must come from the intrinsic physics of the low energy fixed point. Combining with earlier arguments that compressible translation invariant metals are `ersatz Fermi liquids with an infinite number of emergent conserved quantities, we obtain powerful and practical conclusions. We show that there is necessarily a diverging susceptibility for an operator that is odd under inversion/time reversal symmetries, and has zero crystal momentum. We discuss a few other experimental consequences of our arguments, as well as potential loopholes which necessarily imply other exotic phenomena.
A system with charge conservation and lattice translation symmetry has a well-defined filling $ u$, which is a real number representing the average charge per unit cell. We show that if $ u$ is fractional (i.e. not an integer), this imposes very strong constraints on the low-energy theory of the system and give a framework to understand such constraints in great generality, vastly generalizing the Luttinger and Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorems. The most powerful constraint comes about if $ u$ is continuously tunable (i.e. the system is charge-compressible), in which case we show that the low-energy theory must have a very large emergent symmetry group -- larger than any compact Lie group. An example is the Fermi surface of a Fermi liquid, where the charge at every point on the Fermi surface is conserved. We expect that in many, if not all, cases, even exotic non-Fermi liquids will have the same emergent symmetry group as a Fermi liquid, even though they could have very different dynamics. We call a system with this property an ersatz Fermi liquid. We show that ersatz Fermi liquids share a number of properties in common with Fermi liquids, including Luttingers theorem (which is thus extended to a large class of non-Fermi liquids) and periodic quantum oscillations in the response to an applied magnetic field. We also establis
An introductory survey of the theoretical ideas and calculations and the experimental results which depart from Landau Fermi-liquids is presented. Common themes and possible routes to the singularities leading to the breakdown of Landau Fermi liquids are categorized following an elementary discussion of the theory. Soluble examples of Singular Fermi liquids (often called Non-Fermi liquids) include models of impurities in metals with special symmetries and one-dimensional interacting fermions. A review of these is followed by a discussion of Singular Fermi liquids in a wide variety of experimental situations and theoretical models. These include the effects of low-energy collective fluctuations, gauge fields due either to symmetries in the hamiltonian or possible dynamically generated symmetries, fluctuations around quantum critical points, the normal state of high temperature superconductors and the two-dimensional metallic state. For the last three systems, the principal experimental results are summarized and the outstanding theoretical issues highlighted.
We consider an electron gas, both in two (2D) and three (3D) dimensions, interacting with quenched impurities and phonons within leading order finite-temperature many body perturbation theories, calculating the electron self-energies, spectral functions, and momentum distribution functions at finite temperatures. The resultant spectral function is in general highly non-Lorentzian, indicating that the system is not a Fermi liquid in the usual sense. The calculated momentum distribution function cannot be approximated by a Fermi function at any temperature, providing a rather simple example of a non-Fermi liquid with well-understood properties.
We study in this paper the general properties of a many body system of fermions in arbitrary dimensions assuming that the {em momentum} of individual fermions are good quantum numbers of the system. We call these systems $k$-Fermi liquids. We show how Fermi liquid, Luttinger liquid (or Fermi liquid with exclusion statistics) and spin-charge separation arises from this framework. Two exactly solvable $k$-Fermi liquid models with spin-charge separation are discussed as examples.
At certain quantum critical points in metals an entire Fermi surface may disappear. A crucial question is the nature of the electronic excitations at the critical point. Here we provide arguments showing that at such quantum critical points the Fermi surface remains sharply defined even though the Landau quasiparticle is absent. The presence of such a critical Fermi surface has a number of consequences for the universal phenomena near the quantum critical point which are discussed. In particular the structure of scaling of the universal critical singularities can be significantly modified from more familiar criticality. Scaling hypotheses appropriate to a critical fermi surface are proposed. Implications for experiments on heavy fermion critical points are discussed. Various phenomena in the normal state of the cuprates are also examined from this perspective. We suggest that a phase transition that involves a dramatic reconstruction of the Fermi surface might underlie a number of strange observations in the metallic states above the superconducting dome.