A hallmark of a Fermi liquid is a collective excitation associated with fluctuations of the Fermi surface, which evolves into the well-known plasmon in the presence of Coulomb interactions. This paper addresses the fate of the plasmon excitation in non-Fermi liquid metals with a sharply defined Fermi surface, but where long-lived single-electron excitations are absent. The authors use two complementary theoretical techniques to analyze the collective density fluctuations and their decay into the two-particle continuum for three distinct solvable examples of non-Fermi liquids.
The strange metallic regime across a number of high-temperature superconducting materials presents numerous challenges to the classic theory of Fermi liquid metals. Recent measurements of the dynamical charge response of strange metals, including optimally doped cuprates, have revealed a broad, featureless continuum of excitations, extending over much of the Brillouin zone. The collective density oscillations of this strange metal decay into the continuum in a manner that is at odds with the expectations of Fermi liquid theory. Inspired by these observations, we investigate the phenomenology of bosonic collective modes and the particle-hole excitations in a class of strange metals by making an analogy to the phonons of classical lattices falling apart across an unconventional jamming-like transition associated with the onset of rigidity. By making comparisons to the experimentally measured dynamical response functions, we reproduce many of the qualitative features using the above framework. We conjecture that the dynamics of electronic charge density over an intermediate range of energy scales in a class of strongly correlated metals can be at the brink of a jamming-like transition.
The strange metal is an enigma within the field of many-body quantum physics, as it defies the standard Fermi liquid theory of metals due to the absence of well-defined, electron-like quasiparticles. It has been presumed that strange metal behavior arises due to strong correlations between electrons that are not present in ordinary Fermi liquids, but the exact nature of these correlations is unknown. To this end, this thesis aims to address the fundamental question: What, precisely, is so strongly correlated about charge in the strange metal? This question is tackled by experimentally measuring the dynamic charge response function, which directly encodes charge correlations in momentum and energy, using the technique of Momentum-resolved Electron Energy-loss Spectroscopy (M-EELS). In particular, two prototypical members of the cuprate and ruthenate strange metal families are studied: Bi-2212 and Sr
2RuO
4. By studying Bi-2212 at optimal doping, it is found that the charge response of the strange metal is characterized by a broad continuum of fluctuations that are momentum and energy independent over a large range of parameter space, unlike Fermi liquid charge correlations which exhibit propagating density waves of charge with well defined energy and momentum (i.e. plasmons). We argue that, in essence, the charge correlations of the strange metal are highly localized in both space and time, unlike the Fermi Liquid where they are localized in momentum and energy instead. To understand how charge correlations change as one leaves the strange metal regime, the M-EELS response of Bi-2212 is mapped out as a function of doping and temperature. At high temperature, it is found that the continuum is largely doping independent. However, upon cooling, very large changes in spectral weight are observed over a range of energy scales nearly two orders of magnitude larger than the thermal scale
kBT. Moreover, this change in spectral weight undergoes a sign reversal as a function of doping, with spectral weight enhancement on the underdoped side, suppression in the overdoped regime, and no change at optimal doping. These changes in spectral weight are completely unlike the case of the Fermi liquid, where doping only acts to rigidly shift the plasmon energy and no significant changes occur as a function of temperature. Finally, we venture further and ask whether strange metal and Fermi liquid charge correlations can simultaneously coexist in a material. To explore this possibility, we measured the M-EELS response of Sr
2RuO
4, a material which exhibits strange and bad metal behavior at high temperature, but transitions to a well-defined Fermi liquid at low temperature. Surprisingly, in the strange metal regime, Sr
2RuO
4 exhibits both a broad continuum similar to Bi-2212 and a propagating Fermi liquid collective mode at low-energies and momentum. Upon cooling, low-energy spectral weight is suppressed in the strange metal continuum and the Fermi liquid collective mode velocity is strongly renormalized. These findings confirm the strange metal and Fermi liquid can coexist and demonstrate that Sr
2RuO
4 exhibits charge correlations with strange metal character at high energies and short length scales and Fermi liquid character at low energies and long wavelengths.
Elucidating the impact of strong electronic interactions on the collective excitations of metallic systems has been of longstanding interest, mainly due to the inadequacy of the random phase approximation (RPA) in the strongly correlated regime. Here, we adopt our newly developed radial Kotliar and Ruckenstein slave boson representation to analyze the charge excitation spectrum of a Hubbard model, extended with long range interactions. Working on the face centered cubic lattice, at half filling, and in different coupling regimes ranging from uncorrelated to the metal-to-insulator transition, we compare our results to conventional RPA as a benchmark. We focus on the influence of the local and long range couplings on the particle-hole excitation continuum and the plasmon and upper Hubbard band collective modes. Beyond the weak coupling regime, we find numerous quantitative and even qualitative discrepancies between our method and standard RPA. Our work thus deepens the understanding of charge collective modes in correlated systems and lays the foundations for future studies of a broad series of materials.
This note addresses the effects of long-ranged and/or retarded interactions on the bosonic collective modes in the so-called 'strange metals'. Recently, there have been conflicting reports on the very existence of such stable collective excitations and their properties. Extending a number of approaches that were previously used in the analyses of the standard Fermi liquid one finds evidence for, both, conventional and novel behaviors of the non-Fermi-liquid counterparts of the zero-, shear-, and other 'sounds'.
Abstract Using the Landau kinetic equation to study the non-equilibrium behavior of interacting Fermi systems is one of the crowning achievements of Landau’s Fermi liquid theory. While thorough study of transport modes has been done for standard three-dimensional Fermi liquids, an equally in-depth analysis for two dimensional Fermi liquids is lacking. In applying the Landau kinetic equation (LKE) to a two-dimensional Fermi liquid, we obtain unconventional behavior of the zero sound mode c 0 . As a function of the usual dimensionless parameter s = ω / q v F , we find two peculiar results: first, for | s | > 1 we see the propagation of an undamped mode for weakly interacting systems. This differs from the three dimensional case where an undamped mode only propagates for repulsive interactions and the mode experiences Landau damping for any arbitrary attractive interaction. Second, we find that regardless of interaction strength, a propagating mode is forbidden for | s | < 1. This is profoundly different from the three-dimensional case where a mode can propagate, albeit damped. In addition, we present a revised Pomeranchuk instability condition for a two-dimensional Fermi liquid as well as equations of motion for the fluid that follow directly from the LKE. In two dimensions, we find a constant minimum for all Landau parameters for ℓ ⩾ 1 which differs from the three dimensional case. Finally we discuss the effect of a Coulomb interaction on the system resulting in the plasmon frequency ω p exhibiting a crossover to the zero sound mode.