No Arabic abstract
When Fermi surfaces (FS) are subject to long-range interactions that are marginal in the renormalization-group sense, Landau Fermi liquids are destroyed, but only barely. With the interaction further screened by particle-hole excitations through one-loop quantum corrections, it has been believed that these marginal Fermi liquids (MFLs) are described by weakly coupled field theories at low energies. In this paper, we point out a possibility in which higher-loop processes qualitatively change the picture through UV/IR mixing, in which the size of FS enters as a relevant scale. The UV/IR mixing effect enhances the coupling at low energies, such that the basin of attraction for the weakly coupled fixed point of a (2+1)-dimemsional MFL shrinks to a measure-zero set in the low-energy limit. This UV/IR mixing is caused by gapless virtual Cooper pairs that spread over the entire FS through the marginal long-range interactions. Our finding signals a possible breakdown of the patch description for the MFL, and questions the validity of using the MFL as the base theory in a controlled scheme for non-Fermi liquids that arise from relevant long-range interactions.
We develop a theory of viscous dissipation in one-dimensional single-component quantum liquids at low temperatures. Such liquids are characterized by a single viscosity coefficient, the bulk viscosity. We show that for a generic interaction between the constituent particles this viscosity diverges in the zero-temperature limit. In the special case of integrable models, the viscosity is infinite at any temperature, which can be interpreted as a breakdown of the hydrodynamic description. Our consideration is applicable to all single-component Galilean-invariant one-dimensional quantum liquids, regardless of the statistics of the constituent particles and the interaction strength.
Recent theoretical studies have found quantum spin liquid states with spinon Fermi surfaces upon the application of a magnetic field on a gapped state with topological order. We investigate the thermal Hall conductivity across this transition, describing how the quantized thermal Hall conductivity of the gapped state changes to an unquantized thermal Hall conductivity in the gapless spinon Fermi surface state. We consider two cases, both of potential experimental interest: the state with non-Abelian Ising topological order on the honeycomb lattice, and the state with Abelian chiral spin liquid topological order on the triangular lattice.
We consider in depth the applicability of the Wiedemann-Franz (WF) law, namely that the electronic thermal conductivity ($kappa$) is proportional to the product of the absolute temperature ($T$) and the electrical conductivity ($sigma$) in a metal with the constant of proportionality, the so-called Lorenz number $L_0$, being a materials-independent universal constant in all systems obeying the Fermi liquid (FL) paradigm. It has been often stated that the validity (invalidity) of the WF law is the hallmark of an FL (non-Fermi-liquid (NFL)). We consider, both in two (2D) and three (3D) dimensions, a system of conduction electrons at a finite temperature $T$ coupled to a bath of acoustic phonons and quenched impurities, ignoring effects of electron-electron interactions. We find that the WF law is violated arbitrarily strongly with the effective Lorenz number vanishing at low temperatures as long as phonon scattering is stronger than impurity scattering. This happens both in 2D and in 3D for $T<T_{BG}$, where $T_{BG}$ is the Bloch-Gruneisen temperature of the system. In the absence of phonon scattering (or equivalently, when impurity scattering is much stronger than the phonon scattering), however, the WF law is restored at low temperatures even if the impurity scattering is mostly small angle forward scattering. Thus, strictly at $T=0$ the WF law is always valid in a FL in the presence of infinitesimal impurity scattering. For strong phonon scattering, the WF law is restored for $T> T_{BG}$ (or the Debye temperature $T_D$, whichever is lower) as in usual metals. At very high temperatures, thermal smearing of the Fermi surface causes the effective Lorenz number to go below $L_0$ manifesting a quantitative deviation from the WF law. Our work establishes definitively that the uncritical association of an NFL behavior with the failure of the WF law is incorrect.
We investigate the interplay of Coulomb interactions and correlated disorder in pseudospin-3/2 semimetals, which exhibit birefringent spectra in the absence of interactions. Coulomb interactions drive the system to a marginal Fermi liquid, both for the two-dimensional (2d) and three-dimensional (3d) cases. Short-ranged correlated disorder and a power-law correlated disorder have the same engineering dimension as the Coulomb term, for the 2d and 3d systems, respectively, in a renormalization group (RG) sense. In order to analyze the combined effects of these two kinds of interactions, we apply a dimensional regularization scheme and derive the RG flow equations. The results show that the marginal Fermi liquid phase is robust against disorder.
We derive the quantum Boltzmann equation (QBE) by using generalized Landau-interaction parameters, obtained through the nonequilibrium Greens function technique. This is a generalization of the usual QBE formalism to non-Fermi liquid (NFL) systems, which do not have well-defined quasiparticles. We apply this framework to a controlled low-energy effective field theory for the Ising-nematic quantum critical point, in order to find the collective excitations of the critical Fermi surface in the collisionless regime. We also compute the nature of the dispersion after the addition of weak Coulomb interactions. The zero angular momentum longitudinal vibrations of the Fermi surface show a linear-in-wavenumber dispersion, which corresponds to the zero sound of Landaus Fermi liquid theory. The Coulomb interaction modifies it to a plasmon mode in the long-wavelength limit, which disperses as the square-root of the wavenumber. Remarkably, our results show that the zero sound and plasmon modes show the same behaviour as in a Fermi liquid, although an NFL is fundamentally different from the former.