In a clean quantum critical metal, and in the absence of umklapp, most d.c. conductivities are formally infinite due to momentum conservation. However, there is a particular combination of the charge and heat currents which has a finite, universal conductivity. In this paper, we describe the physics of this conductivity σ Q in quantum critical metals obtained by charge doping a strongly interacting conformal field theory. We show that it satisfies an Einstein relation and controls the diffusivity of a conserved charge in the metal. We compute σ Q in a class of theories with holographic gravitational duals. Finally, we show how the temperature scaling of σ Q depends on certain critical exponents characterizing the quantum critical metal. The holographic results are found to be reproduced by the scaling analysis, with the charge density operator becoming marginal in the emergent low energy quantum critical theory.
In a clean quantum critical metal, and in the absence of umklapp, most d.c. conductivities are formally infinite due to momentum conservation. However, there is a particular combination of the charge and heat currents which has a finite, universal conductivity. In this paper, we describe the physics of this conductivity σ Q in quantum critical metals obtained by charge doping a strongly interacting conformal field theory. We show that it satisfies an Einstein relation and controls the diffusivity of a conserved charge in the metal. We compute σ Q in a class of theories with holographic gravitational duals. Finally, we show how the temperature scaling of σ Q depends on certain critical exponents characterizing the quantum critical metal. The holographic results are found to be reproduced by the scaling analysis, with the charge density operator becoming marginal in the emergent low energy quantum critical theory.
We compute the universal conductivity of the (2+1)-dimensional XY universality class, which is realized for a superfluid-to-Mott insulator quantum phase transition at constant density. Based on large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of the classical (2+1)-dimensional J-current model and the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, we can precisely determine the conductivity on the quantum critical plateau, σ(∞) = 0.359(4)σQ with σQ the conductivity quantum. The universal conductivity curve is the standard example with the lowest number of components where the bottoms-up AdS/CFT correspondence from string theory can be tested and made to use [R. C. Myers, S. Sachdev, and A. Singh, Phys. Rev. D 83, 066017 (2011)]. For the first time, the shape of the σ(iω(n)) - σ(∞) function in the Matsubara representation is accurate enough for a conclusive comparison and establishes the particlelike nature of charge transport. We find that the holographic gauge-gravity duality theory for transport properties can be made compatible with the data if temperature of the horizon of the black brane is different from the temperature of the conformal field theory. The requirements for measuring the universal conductivity in a cold gas experiment are also determined by our calculation.
We study electrical transport at quantum critical points (QCPs) associated with loop current ordering in a metal, focusing specifically on models of the “Hertz-Millis” type. At the infrared (IR) fixed point and in the absence of disorder, the simplest such models have infinite DC conductivity and zero incoherent conductivity at nonzero frequencies. However, we find that a particular deformation, involving N N species of bosons and fermions with random couplings in flavor space, admits a finite incoherent, frequency-dependent conductivity at the IR fixed point, \sigma(\omega>0)\sim\omega^{-2/z} σ ( ω > 0 ) ∼ ω − 2 / z , where z z is the boson dynamical exponent. Leveraging the non-perturbative structure of quantum anomalies, we develop a powerful calculational method for transport. The resulting "anomaly-assisted large N N expansion" allows us to extract the conductivity systematically. Although our results imply that such random-flavor models are problematic as a description of the physical N = 1 N = 1 system, they serve to illustrate some general conditions for quantum critical transport as well as the anomaly-assisted calculational methods. In addition, we revisit an old result that irrelevant operators generate a frequency-dependent conductivity, \sigma(\omega>0) \sim \omega^{-2(z-2)/z} σ ( ω > 0 ) ∼ ω − 2 ( z − 2 ) / z , in problems of this kind. We show explicitly, within the scope of the original calculation, that this result does not hold for any order parameter.
We compute three-point correlators between the stress-energy tensor and the conserved currents of conformal field theories (CFTs) in 2+1 dimensions. We first compute the correlators in the large-flavor-number expansion of conformal gauge theories and then perform the computation using holography. In the holographic approach, the correlators are computed from an effective action on (3+1)-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS4) and depend upon the coefficient $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ of a four-derivative term in the action. We find a precise match between the CFT and the holographic results, thus, fixing the values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. The CFTs of free fermions and bosons take the values $\ensuremath{\gamma}=1/12,\ensuremath{-}1/12$, respectively, and so saturate the bound $|\ensuremath{\gamma}|\ensuremath{\le}1/12$ obtained earlier from the holographic theory; the correlator of the conserved gauge flux of U(1) gauge theories takes intermediate values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. The value of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ also controls the frequency dependence of the conductivity and other properties of quantum critical transport at nonzero temperatures. Our results for the values of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ lead to an appealing physical interpretation of particlelike or vortexlike transport near quantum phase transitions of interest in condensed-matter physics. This paper includes Appendices reviewing key features of the AdS-CFT correspondence for condensed-matter physicists.
We compute direct current thermoelectric transport coefficients in strongly coupled quantum field theories without long lived quasiparticles, at finite temperature and charge density, and disordered on long wavelengths compared to the length scale of local thermalization. Many previous transport computations in strongly coupled systems are interpretable hydrodynamically, despite formally going beyond the hydrodynamic regime. This includes momentum relaxation times previously derived by the memory matrix formalism, and non-perturbative holographic results; in the latter case, this is subject to some important subtleties. Our formalism may extend some memory matrix computations to higher orders in the perturbative disorder strength, as well as give valuable insight into non-perturbative regimes. Strongly coupled metals with quantum critical contributions to transport generically transition between coherent and incoherent metals as disorder strength is increased at fixed temperature, analogous to mean field holographic treatments of disorder. From a condensed matter perspective, our theory generalizes the resistor network approximation, and associated variational techniques, to strongly interacting systems where momentum is long lived.
A bstract Semi-holography, originally proposed as a model for conducting lattice electrons coupled to a holographic critical sector, leads to an effective theory of non-Fermi liquids with only a few relevant interactions on the Fermi surface in the large N limit. A refined version of such theories has only two effective couplings, which give holographic and Fermi-liquid-like contributions to the self-energy, respectively. We show that a low co-dimension sub-manifold exists in the space of refined semi-holographic theories in which strange metallic behavior is manifested and which can be obtained just by tuning the ratio of the two couplings. On this sub-manifold, the product of the spectral function and the temperature is approximately independent of the critical exponent, the Fermi energy, and the temperature at all frequencies and near the Fermi surface when expressed in terms of suitably scaled momentum and frequency variables. This quasi-universal behavior leads to linear-in- T dc resistivity and Planckian dissipation over a large range of temperatures, and we also obtain T −3 scaling of the Hall conductivity at higher temperatures. The quasi-universal spectral function also fits well with photoemission spectroscopic data without varying the critical exponent with the doping. Combining with the results for optical conductivity, we construct a generalized version of Drude phenomenology for strange-metallic behavior, which satisfies non-trivial consistency tests. Finally, we discuss a possible dynamical mechanism for the fine-tuning of the ratio of the two couplings necessary to realize the strange metallic behavior in a typical state.
We study the thermal diffusivity D[subscript T] in models of metals without quasiparticle excitations (“strange metals”). The many-body quantum chaos and transport properties of such metals can be efficiently described by a holographic representation in a gravitational theory in an emergent curved spacetime with an additional spatial dimension. We find that at generic infrared fixed points D[subscript T] is always related to parameters characterizing many-body quantum chaos: the butterfly velocity v[subscript B] and Lyapunov time τ[subscript L] through D[subscript T]∼v[subscript B][superscript 2]τ[subscript L]. The relationship holds independently of the charge density, periodic potential strength, or magnetic field at the fixed point. The generality of this result follows from the observation that the thermal conductivity of strange metals depends only on the metric near the horizon of a black hole in the emergent spacetime and is otherwise insensitive to the profile of any matter fields.