The long search for insulating materials that possess low-energy quasiparticles carrying electron's quantum numbers except charge-inspired by the neutral spin-1/2 excitations, the so-called spinons, exhibited by Anderson's resonating-valence-bond state-seems to have reached a turning point after the discovery of several Mott insulators displaying the same thermal and magnetic properties as metals, including quantum oscillations in a magnetic field. Here, we show that such anomalous behavior is not inconsistent with Landau's Fermi liquid theory of quasiparticles at a Luttinger surface. That is the manifold of zeros within the Brillouin zone of the single-particle Green's function at zero frequency, and which thus defines the spinon Fermi surface conjectured by Anderson.
The long search for insulating materials that possess low-energy quasiparticles carrying electron's quantum numbers except charge-inspired by the neutral spin-1/2 excitations, the so-called spinons, exhibited by Anderson's resonating-valence-bond state-seems to have reached a turning point after the discovery of several Mott insulators displaying the same thermal and magnetic properties as metals, including quantum oscillations in a magnetic field. Here, we show that such anomalous behavior is not inconsistent with Landau's Fermi liquid theory of quasiparticles at a Luttinger surface. That is the manifold of zeros within the Brillouin zone of the single-particle Green's function at zero frequency, and which thus defines the spinon Fermi surface conjectured by Anderson.
In periodic systems of interacting electrons, Fermi and Luttinger surfaces refer to the locations within the Brillouin zone of poles and zeros, respectively, of the single-particle Green's function at zero energy and temperature. Such difference in analytic properties underlies the emergence of well-defined quasiparticles close to a Fermi surface, in contrast to their supposed non-existence close to a Luttinger surface, where the single-particle density-of-states vanishes at zero energy. We here show that, contrary to such common belief, coherent `quasiparticles' do exist also approaching a Luttinger surface in compressible interacting electron systems. Thermodynamic and dynamic properties of such 'quasiparticles' are just those of conventional ones. For instance, they yield well defined quantum oscillations in Luttinger's surface and linear in temperature specific heat, which is striking given the vanishing density of states of physical electrons, but actually not uncommon in strongly correlated materials.
In periodic systems of interacting electrons, Fermi and Luttinger surfaces refer to the locations within the Brillouin zone of poles and zeros, respectively, of the single-particle Green's function at zero energy and temperature. Such difference in analytic properties underlies the emergence of well-defined quasiparticles close to a Fermi surface, in contrast to their supposed non-existence close to a Luttinger surface, where the single-particle density-of-states vanishes at zero energy. We here show that, contrary to such common belief, dispersive 'quasiparticles' with infinite lifetime do exist also close to a pseudo-gapped Luttinger surface. Thermodynamic and dynamic properties of such 'quasiparticles' are just those of conventional ones. For instance, they yield well-defined quantum oscillations in Luttinger surface and linear-in-temperature specific heat, which is striking given the vanishing density of states of physical electrons, but actually not uncommon in strongly correlated materials.
Resorting to a recently developed theoretical device called dimensional regularization for quantum criticality with a Fermi surface, we examine a metal-insulator quantum phase transition from a Landau's Fermi-liquid state to a U(1) spin-liquid phase with a spinon Fermi surface in two dimensions. Unfortunately, we fail to approach the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point from the U(1) spin-liquid state within the dimensional regularization technique. Self-interactions between charge fluctuations called holons are not screened, which shows a run-away renormalization group flow, interpreted as holons remain gapped. This leads us to consider another fixed point, where the spinon Fermi surface can be destabilized across the Mott transition. Based on this conjecture, we reveal the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point: Dimensional reduction to one dimension occurs for spin dynamics described by spinons. As a result, Landau damping for both spin and charge dynamics disappear in the vicinity of the Mott quantum critical point. When the flavor number of holons is over its critical value, an interacting fixed point appears to be identified with an inverted XY universality class, controlled within the dimensional regularization technique. On the other hand, a fluctuation-driven first order metal-insulator transition results when it is below the critical number. We propose that the destabilization of a spinon Fermi surface and the emergence of one-dimensional spin dynamics near the spin-liquid Mott quantum critical point can be checked out by spin susceptibility with a 2kF transfer momentum, where kF is a Fermi momentum in the U(1) spin-liquid state: The absence of Landau damping in U(1) gauge fluctuations gives rise to a divergent behavior at zero temperature while it vanishes in the presence of a spinon Fermi surface.
Many strongly correlated electron systems fall outside the conventional quasiparticle paradigm. Their low-energy fermionic excitations need not be adiabatically connected to the bare electrons or appear as poles of the physical electron single-particle Green's function. This thesis investigates to what extent an effective quasiparticle description can nevertheless survive, and which emergent degrees of freedom provide the appropriate low-energy structure. First, the interaction-driven evolution from a quantum spin Hall insulator to a Mott insulator is studied using the dynamical cluster approximation. Dispersive zeros of the single-particle Green's function emerge near the Mott transition and retain a nontrivial topological character. When symmetry breaking is allowed, a nontopological excitonic insulator is found to intrude between quantum spin Hall and Mott insulators. Encoding both poles and zeros within a low-energy quasiparticle Hamiltonian provides a continuous one-body description of the three phases. On the Mott side, its gap evolution supports interpreting the soft excitonic mode as a bound state of quasiparticle and quasihole excitations tied to the Green's function zeros, rather than to the widely separated Hubbard bands. Second, the intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity of a topological metal is analyzed within a multiband extension of Landau Fermi-liquid theory. Residual interactions among quasiparticles at the Fermi surface dress the dynamic current vertex and generate corrections to the Berry-curvature contribution obtained from the quasiparticle bands alone. Our result supports recent claims that the correct expressions for topological observables include vertex corrections besides the topological invariants built just upon the Green's function. It also demonstrates that such corrections are naturally accounted for by Landau Fermi-liquid theory. Extracting the relevant ingredients for an effective description of material-relevant correlated systems requires computational tools that remain reliable at low temperatures. To this end, a deterministic strong-coupling impurity solver for dynamical mean-field theory is discussed. By providing static, dynamical, and thermodynamic observables without stochastic sampling, it offers a promising route toward multiorbital and spin-orbit coupled problems where conventional Monte Carlo methods currently struggle. Finally, the auxiliary quasiparticle framework underlying the ghost-Gutzwiller Ansatz is investigated. On a model for correlated quantum spin Hall insulators, we show that the topology of the interacting state is encoded in the auxiliary one-body Hamiltonian. The resulting band-structure reveals topological Hubbard bands whose topological character can be tuned through a finite magnetization. When applied to the single-band t-J model, the same framework yields a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*). In this phase, dispersive neutral spinons, with vanishing physical-electron spectral weight, coexist with conventional quasiparticles forming a small hole-like Fermi surface, thus violating Luttinger's theorem. The corresponding temperature--doping phase diagram contains a low-doping FL*, a d-wave superconducting dome, and an overdoped conventional Fermi liquid, thereby reproducing key qualitative features of cuprate phenomenology.
We prove that the Mott insulating state is characterized by a divergence of the electron self-energy at well-defined values of momenta in the first Brillouin zone. When particle-hole symmetry is present, the divergence obtains at the momenta of the Fermi surface for the corresponding noninteracting system. Such a divergence gives rise to a surface of zeros (the Luttinger surface) of the single-particle Green function and offers a single unifying principle of Mottness from which pseudogap phenomena, spectral weight transfer, and broad spectral features emerge in doped Mott insulators. We also show that only when particle-hole symmetry is present does the volume of the zero surface equal the particle density. We identify that the general breakdown of Luttinger's theorem in a Mott insulator arises from the breakdown of a perturbative expansion for the self-energy in the single-particle Green function around the noninteracting limit. A modified version of Luttinger's theorem is derived for special cases.
We study in this paper quantum spin liquid states (QSLs) at the vicinity of the metal-insulator transition. Assuming that the low-energy excitations in the QSLs are labeled by ``spinon'' occupation numbers with the same Fermi surface structure as in the corresponding metal (Fermi-liquid) side, we propose a phenomenological Landau-like low-energy theory for the QSLs and show that the usual U(1) QSLs is a representative member of this class of spin liquids. Based on our effective low-energy theory, an alternative picture to the Brinkman-Rice picture of the Mott metal-insulator transition is proposed. The charge, spin, and thermal responses of QSLs are discussed under such a phenomenology.