We study electric, thermal, and thermoelectric conductivities in the vicinity of a
z=2 superconductor-diffusive metal transition in two dimensions, both in the high- and low-frequency limits. We find violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law and a dc thermoelectric conductivity $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ that does not vanish at low temperatures, in contrast to Fermi liquids. We introduce a Langevin equation formalism to study critical dynamics over a broad region surrounding the quantum critical point.
Recently, it has been proposed that the butterfly velocity — a speed at which quantum information propagates — may provide a fundamental bound on diffusion constants in dirty incoherent metals. We analytically compute the charge diffusion constant and the butterfly velocity in charge-neutral holographic matter with long wavelength “hydrodynamic” disorder in a single spatial direction. In this limit, we find that the butterfly velocity does not set a sharp lower bound for the charge diffusion constant.
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138(Dated: Printed February 2, 2008)We study electric, thermal, and thermoelectric conductivities in the vicinity of a z = 2superconductor-diffusive metal transition in two dimensions, both in the high and low frequencylimits. We find violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law and a dc thermoelectric conductivity α thatdoes not vanish at low temperatures, in contrast to Fermi liquids. We introduce a Langevin equationformalism to study critical dynamics over a broad region surrounding the quantum critical point.INTRODUCTION
We study charge and heat transport in the square lattice Hubbard model at strong coupling using the finite-temperature Lanczos method. We construct the diffusion matrix and estimate the effect of thermoelectric terms on diffusive and hydrodynamic time evolution. The thermoelectric terms prevent the interpretation of the diffusion in terms of a single time scale. We discuss our results in relation to cold-atom experiments and measurements of heat conductivity based on the measurements of heat diffusion.
We study charge and energy diffusion in simple holographic theories with broken translational symmetry. We find that when the effects of momentum relaxation are very strong the diffusion constants take universal values ${D}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}{D}_{e}\ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{\hbar}{v}_{B}^{2}/({k}_{B}T)$. Here
vB is the velocity of the butterfly effect and the coefficients of proportionality depend only on the scaling exponents of the infra-red fixed point. Our results suggest that diffusion in these incoherent black holes is controlled by $\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{\hbar}/({k}_{B}T)$ independently of the mechanism of momentum relaxation.
Good metals are characterized by diffusive transport of coherent quasiparticle states and the resistivity is much less than the Mott-Ioffe-Regel (MIR) limit,
e2ha, where
a is the lattice constant. In bad metals, such as many strongly correlated electron materials, the resistivity exceeds the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit and the transport is incoherent in nature. Hartnoll, loosely motivated by holographic duality (AdS/CFT correspondence) in string theory, recently proposed a lower bound to the charge-diffusion constant, $D\ensuremath{\gtrsim}\ensuremath{\hbar}{v}_{F}^{2}/({k}_{B}T)$, in the incoherent regime of transport, where
vF is the Fermi velocity and
T the temperature. Using dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) we calculate the charge-diffusion constant in a single band Hubbard model at half filling. We show that in the strongly correlated regime the Hartnoll's bound is violated in the crossover region between the coherent Fermi-liquid region and the incoherent (bad metal) local moment region. The violation occurs even when the bare Fermi velocity
vF is replaced by its low-temperature renormalized value
vF∗. The bound is satisfied at all temperatures in the weakly and moderately correlated systems as well as in strongly correlated systems in the high-temperature region where the resistivity is close to linear in temperature. Our calculated charge-diffusion constant, in the incoherent regime of transport, also strongly violates a proposed quantum limit of spin diffusion, ${D}_{s}\ensuremath{\sim}1.3\ensuremath{\hbar}/m$, where
m is the fermion mass, experimentally observed and theoretically calculated in a cold degenerate Fermi gas in the unitary limit of scattering.