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arXiv:0903.2477 · Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields

Non-Fermi liquids from holography

Hong Liu, John McGreevy, David Vegh

Published Mar 28, 2011• 487 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report on a potentially new class of non-Fermi liquids in ($2+1$)-dimensions. They are identified via the response functions of composite fermionic operators in a class of strongly interacting quantum field theories at finite density, computed using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We find strong evidence of Fermi surfaces: gapless fermionic excitations at discrete shells in momentum space. The spectral weight exhibits novel phenomena, including particle-hole asymmetry, discrete scale invariance, and scaling behavior consistent with that of a critical Fermi surface postulated by Senthil.

DOI
10.1103/physrevd.83.065029

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We report on a potentially new class of non-Fermi liquids in (2+12+12+1)-dimensions. They are identified via the response functions of composite fermionic operators in a class of strongly interacting quantum field theories at finite density, computed using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We find strong evidence of Fermi surfaces: gapless fermionic excitations at discrete shells in momentum space. The spectral weight exhibits novel phenomena, including particle-hole asymmetry, discrete scale invariance, and scaling behavior consistent with that of a critical Fermi surface postulated by Senthil.
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Using the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, we calculate a fermionic spectral function in a 2+12+12+1 dimensional nonrelativistic quantum field theory which is dual to a gravitational theory in the AdS4{\mathrm{AdS}}_{4}AdS4​ background with a charged black hole. The spectral function shows no quasiparticle peak but the Fermi surface is still well-defined. Interestingly, all momentum points inside the Fermi surface are critical and the gapless modes are defined in a critical Fermi ball in the momentum space.
A defining feature of non-Fermi liquids is a lack of the quasiparticle peak on the Fermi surface in the spectral function, which is usually realized by coupling a finite density of fermions with critical collective fluctuations. However, these features of the two- and three-point vertex functions are qualitatively the same across many non-Fermi liquids, which has made it difficult to classify them beyond the definition by negation. We point out that the four-point function in the pairing channel contains rich information that positively differentiates distinct types of non-Fermi liquids. Using the generalized notion of fixed points that captures scale-dependent universal pairing interaction, we provide a non-perturbative classification of 2+1-dimensional non-Fermi liquids. In the large Fermi momentum limit with fixed dimensionless couplings, metals coupled with long-wavelength critical fluctuations are classified into seven superuniversality classes. Each of them exhibits a unique phase diagram in the space of temperature and bare four-fermion coupling. The present work generalizes the earlier perturbative classification to strongly interacting non-Fermi liquids by leveraging kinematic constraints.
A central problem in quantum condensed matter physics is the critical theory governing the zero temperature quantum phase transition between strongly renormalized Fermi-liquids as found in heavy fermion intermetallics and possibly high Tc superconductors. We present here results showing that the mathematics of string theory is capable of describing such fermionic quantum critical states. Using the Anti-de-Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence to relate fermionic quantum critical fields to a gravitational problem, we compute the spectral functions of fermions in the field theory. By increasing the fermion density away from the relativistic quantum critical point, a state emerges with all the features of the Fermi-liquid.
The discovery of many strongly correlated metallic phases has inspired different routes to generalize or go beyond the celebrated Landau Fermi liquid theory. To this end, from universal consideration of symmetries and anomalies, Else, Thorngren, and Senthil (ETS) have introduced a class of theories called ersatz Fermi liquids which possess a Fermi surface and satisfy a generalized Luttinger's theorem. In this work, we view all such fermion liquids obeying the Luttinger theorem as incompressible quantum Hall liquids in higher-dimensional phase space and use it as the starting point to derive their effective low-energy field theory. The noncommutativity of phase space motivates us to use the Seiberg-Witten map to derive the field theory in an ordinary (commutative) space and naturally leads to terms that correspond to the correct topological Chern-Simons action postulated by ETS in one, two, and three dimensions. Additionally, our approach also reproduces all the nontopological terms that characterize important contributions to the response, including the semiclassical equations of motion. Finally, our derivations of Chern-Simons terms from the Seiberg-Witten map also verify a longstanding conjecture in noncommutative field theory.