We report the discovery of phenomena consistent with bad-metal relaxation dynamics in the metallic regime of an optical-lattice Hubbard model. The transport lifetime induced by inter-particle scattering for a mass current of atoms excited by stimulated Raman transitions is measured, and the corresponding analog of resistivity is inferred. By exploring a range of temperature, we demonstrate incompatibility with weak-scattering theory and a key characteristic of bad metals: anomalous resistivity scaling consistent with
T-linear behavior. We also observe the onset of two behaviors---incoherent transport and the approach to the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit---associated with bad metals. The interaction and temperature scaling of resistivity are verified to be consistent with dynamic mean-field theory (DMFT) predictions of a bad metal, which is associated with the reduction of quasiparticle weight by strong interactions.
We investigate the interaction-induced resistivity of ultracold fermions in a three-dimensional optical lattice. In situ observations of transport dynamics enable the determination of real and imaginary resistivity. In the strongly interacting metallic regime, we observe a striking saturation of the current-dissipation rate toward a value that is independent of the interaction strength. This phenomenon is quantitatively captured by a dissipation model that uses a renormalized two-body scattering matrix. We further measure the temperature dependence of resistivity in the strongly interacting limit and discuss the predicted asymptotic high-temperature behavior. Our results provide a clear microscopic understanding of bounded resistivity of low-density metals, thus providing a useful benchmark for studies of strongly correlated atomic and electronic systems.
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.
Electrical current in conventional metals is carried by electrons that retain their individual character. Bad metals, such as the normal state of some high-temperature superconductors, violate this scenario, and the complete picture for their behavior remains unresolved. Here, we report phenomena consistent with bad-metal behaviour in an optical-lattice Hubbard model by measuring the transport lifetime for a mass current excited by stimulated Raman transitions. We demonstrate incompatibility with weak-scattering theory and key characteristics of bad metals: anomalous resistivity scaling consistent with T-linear behavior, the onset of incoherent transport, and the approach to the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit. Our work demonstrates a direct method for determining the transport lifetime, which is critical to theory but difficult to measure in materials, and exposes minimal ingredients for bad-metal behavior.
Quantum simulations are quickly becoming an indispensable tool for studying particle transport in correlated lattice models. One of the central topics in the study of transport is bad-metal behavior, characterized by the direct-current resistivity linear in temperature. In the fermionic Hubbard model, optical conductivity has been studied extensively, and a recent optical lattice experiment demonstrated bad-metal behavior in qualitative agreement with theory. Far less is known about transport in the bosonic Hubbard model. We investigate the conductivity in the Bose-Hubbard model and focus on the regime of strong interactions and high temperatures. We use numerically exact calculations for small lattice sizes. At weak tunneling, we find multiple peaks in the optical conductivity that stem from the Hubbard bands present in the many-body spectrum. This feature slowly washes out as the tunneling rate gets stronger. At high temperature, we identify a regime of
T-linear resistivity, as expected. When the interactions are very strong, the leading inverse-temperature coefficient in conductivity is proportional to the tunneling amplitude. As the tunneling becomes stronger, this dependence takes quadratic form. At very strong coupling and half filling, we identify a separate linear resistivity regime at lower temperature, corresponding to the hard-core boson regime. Additionally, we unexpectedly observe that at half filling, in a big part of the phase diagram, conductivity is an increasing function of the coupling constant before it saturates at the hard-core-boson result. We explain this feature based on the analysis of the many-body energy spectrum and the contributions to conductivity of individual eigenstates of the system.
Recent cold atom experiments have observed bad and strange metal behaviors in strongly-interacting Fermi-Hubbard systems. Motivated by these results, we calculate the thermoelectric transport properties of a 2D Fermi-Hubbard system in the weak coupling limit using quantum kinetic theory. We find that many features attributed to strong correlations are also found at weak coupling. In particular, for temperatures
T≳t the electrical resistivity is nearly linear in temperature despite the fact that the quasiparticle scattering rate is non-linear and changes by nearly an order of magnitude. We argue that this asymptotic behavior is a general feature of systems with a finite spectral width, which implies that there is no MIR bound on the resistivity in single-band models. Due to nesting, the
T-linear resistivity persists down to
T=0 at half filling. Our work sheds light on the transport regime in ultracold atom experiments, which can differ substantially from that of condensed matter systems. Disentangling these band-structure effects from the physics of strong correlations is a major challenge for future experiments.