For nearly a century, the Stoner model has dominated research in itinerant ferromagnetism, yet recent work on ultracold, optically trapped Fermi gases suggests that phase separation of spins occurs independent of long-range magnetic order. In this paper, we consider the breakdown of the Stoner criterion in a Landau-Fermi liquid with weak non-zero gauge field. Due to a process analogous to Kohn's theory of a metal-insulator transition, we find the stability of a Fermi liquid phase in the absence of non-quasiparticle contributions to the response is strongly dependent on Landau parameters of mixed partial waves. Our work paves the way for the description of novel spintronic hardware in the language of Landau-Fermi liquid transport.
For nearly a century, the Stoner model has dominated research in itinerant ferromagnetism, yet recent work on ultracold, optically trapped Fermi gases suggests that phase separation of spins occurs independent of long-range magnetic order. In this paper, we consider the breakdown of the Stoner criterion in a Landau-Fermi liquid with weak non-zero gauge field. Due to a process analogous to Kohn's theory of a metal-insulator transition, we find the stability of a Fermi liquid phase in the absence of non-quasiparticle contributions to the response is strongly dependent on Landau parameters of mixed partial waves. Our work paves the way for the description of novel spintronic hardware in the language of Landau-Fermi liquid transport.
Ferromagnetism is a pure quantum correlation phenomenon, and yet it is responsible for most magnetic phenomena that we encounter in everyday life. Metallic magnets, such as iron and nickel, owe their magnetic behavior to mobile conduction electrons, whose spins can align with one another giving rise to non-zero magnetization. In the 1930s, Edmund C. Stoner first devised a simple and minimal model, where a ferromagnetic instability of the homogeneous Fermi gas is afforded only through short-range repulsive interactions. While his model captures the fundamental physics behind itinerant ferromagnetism, various additional effects in solid materials, such as orbital couplings and peculiar band dispersions, make it difficult to isolate the Stoner mechanism. Here we present our experimental investigation performed on an ultracold Fermi mixture of 6Li atoms where only genuine short-range repulsive interactions are present. Studying the stability of an artificially created ferromagnetic state, we provide a signature of a Stoner-like instability in a metastable system.
In the 1930s, two main paradigms for the theoretical description of ferromagnetism were developed: Heisenberg ferromagnetism of localized fermions (e.g., in a lattice), and Bloch or Stoner ferromagnetism of nonlocalized fermions (i.e., in a gas), also called itinerant ferromagnetism. Despite many theoretical predictions, itinerant ferromagnetism has remained elusive in experiments. This ferromagnetic state is predicted to occur for strong repulsive interactions, corresponding to a regime that is very challenging to describe theoretically because there are multiple competing physical effects, including superfluid pairing. In this paper, we point out that the problem of itinerant ferromagnetism for atomic Fermi gases is different from that of electron gases in metals due to the short-range nature of the interatomic interactions. We also show that the standard saddle point used to describe itinerant ferromagnetism of the electron gas in metals does not apply, because in the short-range limit of this approximation the Pauli exclusion principle is violated. As a remedy, we introduce a modified interaction pseudopotential for ultracold gases which includes both local (Hartree) and nonlocal (Fock) terms while preserving the Pauli exclusion principle in the short-range regime. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of this method to study the existence and stability of itinerant ferromagnetism in ultracold atomic gases. Lastly, we obtain the critical temperature for the ferromagnetic transition as a function of the opposite-spin interaction strength and find a rather good agreement with recent experimental results.
The paradigm of Landau Fermi liquid theory has successfully described the low-energy behavior of numerous metallic systems. However, a growing number of experimental observations in strongly correlated electron materials, such as high-temperature superconductors and heavy fermion compounds, defy this conventional description, exhibiting what is known as non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior. These exotic states lack well-defined quasiparticle excitations, displaying anomalous scaling laws and transport properties. Ultracold atomic gases have emerged as highly controllable quantum simulators for strongly correlated matter, offering unprecedented access to tunable interaction strengths, dimensionality, and lattice geometries. This paper explores the potential of ultracold fermionic gases to unveil and characterize NFL behavior. We review the theoretical underpinnings of Landau Fermi liquid theory and its breakdown, survey prominent theoretical models for NFL states, and highlight experimental techniques in ultracold atomic systems pertinent to their detection. Specific attention is given to phenomena such as the BCS-BEC crossover, quantum criticality, and pseudogap phases in ultracold fermions, where strong interactions are expected to lead to deviations from quasiparticle descriptions. We discuss experimental signatures like anomalous spectral functions, linear-in-temperature resistivity analogs, and deviations in thermodynamic properties, proposing how these could be observed and analyzed in current and future ultracold atom platforms. This research aims to leverage the purity and tunability of atomic gases to gain fundamental insights into the nature of NFL states, contributing to a broader understanding of quantum many-body physics beyond the conventional quasiparticle picture.
Recent advances in rapidly quenched ultracold atomic Fermi gases near a Feshbach resonance have brought about a number of interesting problems in the context of observing the long-sought Stoner ferromagnetic phase transition. The possibility of experimentally obtaining a ``quasirepulsive'' regime in the upper branch of the energy spectrum due to the rapid quench is currently being debated, and the Stoner transition has mainly been investigated theoretically by using perturbation theory or at high polarization due to the limited theoretical approaches in the strongly repulsive regime. In this work, we present a nonperturbative theoretical approach to the quasirepulsive upper branch of a Fermi gas near a broad Feshbach resonance, and we determine the finite-temperature phase diagram for the Stoner instability. Our results agree well with the known quantum Monte Carlo simulations at zero temperature, and we recover the known virial expansion prediction at high temperature for arbitrary interaction strengths. At resonance, we find that the Stoner transition temperature becomes of the order of the Fermi temperature, around which the molecule formation rate becomes vanishingly small. This suggests a feasible way to observe Stoner ferromagnetism in the nondegenerate temperature regime.
The Landau Fermi liquid theory of metals has been so successful that exceptions to it draw a fair amount of attention. The theory rests on the assumption that the low‐energy properties of interacting electrons in a metal in three dimensions may be described in terms of weakly repulsive charged spin 1 2 $ \frac{1}{2} $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351121996/259a876e-1ad1-4598-839f-e9587e88d783/content/inline-math13_1.tif"/> fermionic excitations— the quasiparticles. This is of course not generally expected to hold following a phase transition, for example, in the form of a Pomeranchuk instability or a superconducting transition. In Chapter 2 we showed that Pomeranchuk instabilities occur whenever some Landau F function satisfies the condition F l s ( a ) / ( 2 l + 1 ) = - 1 $ F_{l}^{s(a)} /(2l + 1) = - 1 $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351121996/259a876e-1ad1-4598-839f-e9587e88d783/content/inline-math13_2.tif"/> , where l = 0, 1, 2, . . . denotes the relevant angular momentum channel where the instability occurs. The l = 0 instability in the spin‐symmetric channel is associated with a divergence of compressibility that leads to phase separation and consequent breakdown of the Fermi liquid. In the spin‐antisymmetric channel, the l = 0 instability corresponds to ferromagnetism. In the ferromagnetic quantum critical region (“classical” Gaussian regime in Hertz theory), we found in Sec. 9.6.2.3 that spin fluctuations lead to the destruction of the Landau Fermi liquid and this is evident, for example, in the ln ( 1 / T ) $ {\text{ln }}(1/T) $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351121996/259a876e-1ad1-4598-839f-e9587e88d783/content/inline-math13_3.tif"/> divergence of the specific heat coefficient γ ( T ) . Proximity to an electronic instability is however not a necessary condition for the breakdown of the Fermi liquid. In Sec. 10.2 we found that transverse electromagnetic fluctuations are only weakly screened by conduction electrons and that results in a γ ( T ) ∼ ln ( 1 / T ) $ \gamma (T) \sim {\text{ln }}(1/T) $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781351121996/259a876e-1ad1-4598-839f-e9587e88d783/content/inline-math13_4.tif"/> divergence for the specific heat coefficient without needing to be in the vicinity of a ferromagnetic quantum critical point 1 . The lack of screening of such electromagnetic fluctuations is a feature shared with low energy spin fluctuations in the Hertz theory of quantum critical ferromagnets. Another route to non Fermi‐liquid behavior, not reliant on the existence of long‐range interactions, appeared in Sec. 11.4 where we analyzed non‐optimally screened Kondo models. It was found that singularities in properties such as the susceptibility and specific heat coefficient may be expected in the event that residual low‐energy degeneracies associated with spin‐flip scattering with conduction electrons persist down to the lowest temperatures. Finally, weak potential disorder was found to preserve the Fermi liquid (in three dimensions) down to the lowest temperatures (see Chapter 8 ).
In this paper, we study the superconductivity of nonrelativistic fermions at finite-density coupled to a transverse U(1) gauge field, with the effective interaction including the Landau-damping. This model, first studied by Holstein, Norton, and Pincus [Phys. Rev. B 8, 2649 (1973)] has been known as an example of a non-Fermi liquid, i.e., a metallic state in which the decay rate of a quasiparticle is large compared to the characteristic quasiparticle energy; other examples of the non-Fermi liquid includes the two dimensional (2d) electron gas in a magnetic field at $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/2$ and the normal state of optimally doped cuprate superconductors. Our study thus addresses the question of whether or not non-Fermi liquids, like Fermi liquids, are unstable towards the formation of superconductivity. The results are (i) the non-Fermi liquid is stable against superconductivity below a critical gauge coupling, (ii) above this critical coupling, the ground state is an unconventional superconductor with angular momentum $\ensuremath{\ell}\ensuremath{\ge}2$. Our results are obtained from a solution of the Dyson-Nambu equation. Note that in this problem there is a quantum critical point between a non-Fermi liquid state and the superconducting state, as the critical coupling is nonzero. This is in contrast to a weakly coupled metal, which exhibits superconductivity for infinitesimally weak interaction regardless of its sign.