arXiv:2304.12697 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Weakly damped bosons and precursor gap in the vicinity of an antiferromagnetic metallic transition
Ori Grossman, Erez Berg
Abstract
We study the electronic spectral function of a metal in the vicinity of an antiferromagnetic (AFM) quantum critical point, focusing on a situation where the bare bandwidth of the spin fluctuations is significantly smaller than the Fermi energy. In this limit, we identify a range of energies where the fermionic quasiparticles near the ``hot spots'' on the Fermi surface are strongly scattered by the quantum critical fluctuations, whereas the damping of the AFM fluctuations by the electrons is negligible. Within a one-loop approximation, there is a parameter range where the $T=0$ spectral function at the hot spots has a ``precursor gap'' feature, with a local maximum at a finite frequency. However, we find that the ratio of the bare spin-wave velocity to the Fermi velocity required to obtain a precursor gap is smaller by about an order of magnitude than the value in the electron-doped cuprate superconductors. Hence, our results cannot easily account for the recent angle-resolved photoemission experiments in this system [He et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 116, 3449 (2019)]. At lower frequencies, the Landau damping of the AFM fluctuations becomes important, and the electronic spectral function has the familiar ${\ensuremath{\omega}}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ singularity. Our one-loop perturbative results are supported by a numerical Monte Carlo simulation of electrons coupled to an undamped, nearly critical AFM mode.