Electronic transport in Fermi liquids is usually Ohmic, because of momentum-relaxing scattering due to defects and phonons. These processes can become sufficiently weak in two-dimensional materials, giving rise to either ballistic or hydrodynamic transport, depending on the strength of electron-electron scattering. We show that the ballistic regime is a quantum critical point (QCP) on the regime boundary separating Ohmic and hydrodynamic transport. The QCP corresponds to a \emph{free} conformal field theory (CFT) with a dynamical scaling exponent $z = 1$. Its nontrivial aspects emerge in device geometries with shear, wherein the regime has an intrinsic universal dissipation, a nonlocal current-voltage relation, and exhibits the critical scaling of the underlying CFT. The Fermi surface has electron-hole pockets across all angular scales and the current flow has \emph{vortices} at all spatial scales. We image the fluctuations in high-definition and animate their emergence as experimental parameters are tuned to the QCP (movie links in comments). The vortices clearly demonstrate that Pauli exclusion alone can produce collective effects, with low-frequency AC transport mediated by vortex dynamics. The scale-invariant spatial structure is much richer than that of an interaction-dominated hydrodynamic regime, which only has a single vortex at the device scale. Our findings provide a theoretical framework for both interaction-free and interaction-dominated non-Ohmic transport in two-dimensional materials, as seen in several contemporary experiments.
Electronic transport in Fermi liquids is usually Ohmic, because of momentum-relaxing scattering due to defects and phonons. These processes can become sufficiently weak in two-dimensional materials, giving rise to either ballistic or hydrodynamic transport, depending on the strength of electron-electron scattering. We show that the ballistic regime is a quantum critical point (QCP) on the regime boundary separating Ohmic and hydrodynamic transport. The QCP corresponds to a \emph{free} conformal field theory (CFT) with a dynamical scaling exponent z=1. Its nontrivial aspects emerge in device geometries with shear, wherein the regime has an intrinsic universal dissipation, a nonlocal current-voltage relation, and exhibits the critical scaling of the underlying CFT. The Fermi surface has electron-hole pockets across all angular scales and the current flow has \emph{vortices} at all spatial scales. We image the fluctuations in high-definition and animate their emergence as experimental parameters are tuned to the QCP (movie links in comments). The vortices clearly demonstrate that Pauli exclusion alone can produce collective effects, with low-frequency AC transport mediated by vortex dynamics. The scale-invariant spatial structure is much richer than that of an interaction-dominated hydrodynamic regime, which only has a single vortex at the device scale. Our findings provide a theoretical framework for both interaction-free and interaction-dominated non-Ohmic transport in two-dimensional materials, as seen in several contemporary experiments.
Modern quantum materials host a wide range of electronic phases in which transport properties are governed by strong interactions and collective effects. This thesis investigates charge, heat, and momentum transport in interacting electronic systems across different theoretical frameworks, ranging from Fermi liquid theory to strongly coupled strange metals.The first part of the thesis focuses on two-dimensional Fermi liquids at finite temperature, where rapid electron-electron scattering can give rise to hydrodynamic behavior. A kinetic-theory framework allowing an exact treatment of quasiparticle distribution functions beyond the asymptotic low-temperature regime is used to compute the full spectrum of collective modes, providing a detailed characterization of long-lived odd-parity excitations and the intermediate transport regime between ballistic and hydrodynamic flow. The same framework is employed to determine the shear viscosity of interacting electron liquids beyond conventional perturbative limits.The second part of the thesis concerns strongly interacting quantum systems where the quasiparticle picture breaks down.Holographic duality is used to study transport and thermoelectric response in quantum critical systems subject to periodic potentials, providing a controlled framework for momentum relaxation and magnetotransport in non-Fermi liquids. The thesis further develops holographic models of collective charge dynamics in systems with dynamical electromagnetism, including bulk plasmons and surface plasmon polaritons, and explores connections between Fermi surface physics and holographic gauge-field dynamics.
Clean two-dimensional Fermi liquids are now known to exhibit an intermediate \emph{tomographic} regime, between ballistic and Navier--Stokes transport, caused by the anomalously slow relaxation of parity-odd multipolar deformations of the Fermi surface. Here we show that this anomaly extends to the dynamical realm. Starting from a microscopic numerical evaluation of the linearized electron--electron collision operator, we find that the finite-frequency nonlocal conductivity is controlled at low frequency by a single hydrodynamic pole, σ(q,ω)=D(q)/(iω+η⋆qz), with dynamical exponent z=4/3 and superdiffusive viscosity η⋆. Remarkably, the pole residue itself is scale dependent and obeys D(q)∼q−α with α=1/3, so the dynamical properties are described by two separate exponents rather than one. We interpret the residue suppression using a Krylov-chain description of current relaxation: as q increases, the longest-lived quasinormal mode ceases to be a nearly pure current excitation and spreads over higher odd angular harmonics. Finally, we show that AC transport in narrow channels provides a direct experimental probe of these phenomena.
As a paradigmatic example of multiscale quantum criticality, we consider the Pomeranchuk instability of an isotropic Fermi liquid in two spatial dimensions, d=2. The corresponding Ginzburg-Landau theory for the quadrupolar fluctuations of the Fermi surface consists of two coupled modes, critical at the same point, and characterized by different dynamical exponents: one being ballistic with dynamical exponent z=2 and the other one is Landau damped with z=3, thus giving rise to multiple dynamical scales. We find that at temperature T=0, the ballistic mode governs the low-energy structure of the theory as it possesses the smaller effective dimension d+z. Its self-interaction leads to logarithmic singularities, which we treat with the help of the renormalization group. At finite temperature, the coexistence of two different dynamical scales gives rise to a modified quantum-to-classical crossover. It extends over a parametrically large regime with intricate interactions of quantum and classical fluctuations leading to a universal T dependence of the correlation length independent of the interaction amplitude. The multiple scales are also reflected in the phase diagram and in the critical thermodynamics. In particular, we find that the latter cannot be interpreted in terms of only a single dynamical exponent whereas, e.g., the critical specific heat is determined by the z=3 mode, the critical compressibility is found to be dominated by the z=2 fluctuations.
Abstract We provide a pedagogical review of the main ideas and results in non-equilibrium conformal field theory and connected subjects. These concern the understanding of quantum transport and its statistics at and near critical points. Starting with phenomenological considerations, we explain the general framework, illustrated by the example of the Heisenberg quantum chain. We then introduce the main concepts underlying conformal field theory (CFT), the emergence of critical ballistic transport, and the CFT scattering construction of non-equilibrium steady states. Using this we review the theory for energy transport in homogeneous one-dimensional critical systems, including the complete description of its large deviations and the resulting (extended) fluctuation relations. We generalize some of these ideas to one-dimensional critical charge transport and to the presence of defects, as well as beyond one-dimensional criticality. We describe non-equilibrium transport in free-particle models, where connections are made with generalized Gibbs ensembles, and in higher-dimensional and non-integrable quantum field theories, where the use of the powerful hydrodynamic ideas for non-equilibrium steady states is explained. We finish with a list of open questions. The review does not assume any advanced prior knowledge of conformal field theory, large-deviation theory or hydrodynamics.
We provide a framework for analyzing the problem of interacting electrons in a ballistic quantum dot with chaotic boundary conditions within an energy ET (the Thouless energy) of the Fermi energy. Within this window we show that the interactions can be characterized by Landau Fermi-liquid parameters. When g, the Thouless number (also the dimensionless conductance when it has strong coupling to leads) of the dot, is large, we find that the disordered interacting problem can be solved in a saddle-point approximation which becomes exact as $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{g}\ensuremath{\infty}$ (as in a $\mathrm{l}\mathrm{a}\mathrm{r}\mathrm{g}\mathrm{e}\ensuremath{-}N$ theory). The infinite g theory has two phases as a function of the Landau parameter um in a channel with angular momentum m: A weak-coupling phase where constant charging and exchange interactions dominate the low-energy physics, as in previous ``universal Hamiltonian'' treatments, and a strong-coupling phase characterized by the same order parameter as in the Pomeranchuk transition in clean systems (a spontaneous interaction-induced Fermi-surface distortion), but smeared and pinned by disorder. Thus, both interactions and disorder are crucial to the existence of these phases. At finite g, the two phases and critical point evolve into three regimes in the ${u}_{m}\ensuremath{-}1/g$ plane---weak- and strong-coupling regimes separated by crossover lines from a quantum-critical regime controlled by the quantum-critical point. In this, the first of a two part series, we focus on the consequences of this picture for Coulomb Blockade experiments. We employ analytical and numerical methods to predict the statistics of single-particle levels, Coulomb Blockade peak spacings, conductance peak heights, and quasiparticle widths. We show that in the strong-coupling and quantum-critical regions, the quasiparticle acquires a width of the same order as the level spacing $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ within a few $\ensuremath{\Delta}\mathrm{'}\mathrm{s}$ of the Fermi energy due to coupling to collective excitations. In the strong-coupling regime if m is odd, the dot will (if isolated) crossover from the orthogonal to unitary ensemble for an exponentially small external flux or will (if strongly coupled to leads) break time-reversal symmetry spontaneously. For any m, the peak-spacing distribution becomes broader than expected in previous works and even has support at negative values, which in turn is correlated with small peak heights. Ballistic/chaotic quantum dots afford us unrivalled theoretical and experimental control over the problem of simultaneous disorder and interactions due to the 1/g expansion and our ability to vary disorder and interaction much more readily than in the bulk.
Two-dimensional Fermi liquids at low temperatures have been theoretically established to exhibit an odd-even effect in the collective quasiparticle relaxation rates where even-parity deformations of the Fermi surface decay at a much faster rate than odd-parity ones. A predicted consequence of this effect is a new tomographic transport regime that mixes hydrodynamic and collisionless transport. In the presence of a magnetic field, however, the tomographic regime is expected to evolve towards conventional transport regimes as soon as the cyclotron radius becomes smaller than the dominant odd-parity mean-free path. In this work, we examine this transition from the point of view of collective modes, using a numerically exact solution of the linearized Boltzmann equation within a generalized relaxation time approximation for the odd-parity and even-parity modes. In the absence of a magnetic field, the transverse conductivity exhibits two diffusive tomographic collective modes, and we find that at a critical magnetic field one of these two tomographic modes disappears. Which tomographic mode persists depends on the Landau parameters, and becomes increasingly dominated by hydrodynamic modes at high fields. We corroborate our analysis using a variational approach for the Fermi surface deformation that captures the angular structure of the deformation and the critical magnetic field strength. The collective modes discussed here can in principle be observed by examining the damping of longitudinal and transverse current responses in finite magnetic fields.