We study a set of many-body wave-functions of Fermions that are naturally written using momentum space basis and allow for quantum superposition of Fermion occupancy, $\{n_{\bf k}\}$. This {enables} us to capture the fluctuations of the Fermi-surface {(FS)} -- the singularly most important signature of a metal. We bench-mark our results in one spatial dimensions (1D) to show that these wave-functions allow for quantitative understanding of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL); computations of certain correlators using them can in fact be extended to larger systems sizes compared to conventional exact diagonalization (ED) allowing for a more systematic comparison with bosonization techniques. Finally we show that this basis may be useful for obtaining fixed-point wave-function for strongly correlated metals {in dimensions greater that one}. In particular, we study the case of coherent (equal) superposition of elliptical FS {in continuum (2D) and on a} square lattice{. In case of the former, our variational wave-function systematically interpolates between the phenomenology of the Fermi liquid ground state, i.e., finite single-Fermion residue at a sharp FS, to a non-Fermi liquid (NFL) with zero residue. In the NFL the jump in $\langle n_{\bf k}\rangle$ at the FS is replaced by a point of inflection (similar to a 1D TLL) whose contour is consistent with the Luttinger Theorem. In case of the square lattice, we} find highly anisotropic distribution of the quasi-particle residue, which, at finite resolution has an uncanny resemblance to the Fermi-arcs{, albeit at zero temperature,} seen in the pseudo-gap state of the cuprates.
We study a set of many-body wave-functions of Fermions that are naturally written using momentum space basis and allow for quantum superposition of Fermion occupancy, {nk}. This {enables} us to capture the fluctuations of the Fermi-surface {(FS)} -- the singularly most important signature of a metal. We bench-mark our results in one spatial dimensions (1D) to show that these wave-functions allow for quantitative understanding of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL); computations of certain correlators using them can in fact be extended to larger systems sizes compared to conventional exact diagonalization (ED) allowing for a more systematic comparison with bosonization techniques. Finally we show that this basis may be useful for obtaining fixed-point wave-function for strongly correlated metals {in dimensions greater that one}. In particular, we study the case of coherent (equal) superposition of elliptical FS {in continuum (2D) and on a} square lattice{. In case of the former, our variational wave-function systematically interpolates between the phenomenology of the Fermi liquid ground state, i.e., finite single-Fermion residue at a sharp FS, to a non-Fermi liquid (NFL) with zero residue. In the NFL the jump in ⟨nk⟩ at the FS is replaced by a point of inflection (similar to a 1D TLL) whose contour is consistent with the Luttinger Theorem. In case of the square lattice, we} find highly anisotropic distribution of the quasi-particle residue, which, at finite resolution has an uncanny resemblance to the Fermi-arcs{, albeit at zero temperature,} seen in the pseudo-gap state of the cuprates.
It has long since been argued that the metallic states of the single-band Hubbard Hamiltonian Ĥ in two spatial dimensions (i.e. for d = 2) should be non-Fermi liquid, a possibility that would lead to the understanding of the observed anomalous behaviour of the doped copper-oxide-based superconducting compounds in their normal metallic states. Here we present a formalism which enables us to express, for arbitrary d, the behaviour of the momentum-distribution function nσ(k) pertaining to uniform metallic ground states of Ĥ close to S F; σ (the Fermi surface of the fermions with spin index σ, σ = ↑, ↓) in terms of a small number of constant parameters which are bound to satisfy certain inequalities implied by the requirement of the stability of the ground state of the system. These inequalities restrict the range of variation in nσ(k) for k infinitesimally inside and outside the Fermi sea pertaining to fermions with spin index σ and consequently the range of variation in the zero-temperature limit of nσ(k) for k on S F; σ On the basis of some available accurate numerical results for nσ(k) pertaining to the Hubbard and the t-J Hamiltonian, we conclude that, at least in the strong-coupling regime, the metallic ground states of Ĥ for d = 2 cannot be Fermi-liquid nor can they in general be purely Luttinger or marginal Fermi liquids. We further rigorously identify the pseudogap phenomenon, or 'truncation' of the Fermi surface, clearly observed in the normal states of underdoped copper-oxide-based superconductors, as corresponding to a line of resonance energies (i.e. these energies strictly do not relate to quasiparticles) located below the Fermi energy, with a concomitant suppression to zero of the jump in nσ(k) over the 'truncated' parts of the Fermi surface. Our analyses make explicit the singular significance of the non-interacting energy dispersion ε k underlying Ĥ in determining the low-energy spectral and transport properties of the metallic ground states of Ĥ.
The properties of fermions in one dimension are markedly different from those in higher dimensions. In two or three dimensions, the many-body behaviour of fermions is described by the Fermi liquid model, whose most prominent result is that, instead of studying the behaviour of individual particles, it is better to describe the emergent phenomena of the whole system, known as quasiparticles. These are collective modes of excitations born out of particle-particle interactions, which resemble the constituent single particles, albeit with renormalised mass. In one dimension, however, the formation of such a correlated state is unfavourable and the quasiparticles are completely absent. Instead, 1D fermions are described by a model known as the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. Central to this model is the process of bosonisation, a mathematical technique which maps the excitation of fermions to bosonic modes of spin-density and charge-density waves. As a prerequisite of the bosonisation technique, the fermionic single-particle dispersion is approximated as a linear function. Consequently, the Luttinger liquid model is limited in its scope of applicability. Specifically, it is valid only in the vicinity of the Fermi points, where the excitation energy is low. Recent advancement in the theoretical field has expanded our understanding of 1D interacting fermions beyond the limit of linearity. The mobile-impurity model, proposed by L. Glazman and his co-authors, is a generalised model of 1D fermions which extends the scope of applicability of the Tomanaga-Luttinger model, accounting for the curvature of single-particle dispersion relations. It extends the region of validity of the tradition TLL theory from the neighbourhood of the Fermi points to a band which follows the single-particle dispersion. This thesis presents the results of an experimental work which provides direct evidence of non-linear behaviour predicted by the new model. It revolves around the measurement of the spectral function of electrons in surface-gate-defined quantum wires on a double-quantum-well, GaAs/AlGaAs device, and the comparison and fitting of the result to the non-linear theory. The spectral function is a theoretical concept frequently used in discussions on many-body problems. Its physical interpretation makes it closely related to experimental observables, such as the tunnelling current between the double quantum wells in this work. This thesis consists of three parts. Part one concerns the theories of the various many-body models and the experimental technique: Chapter 1 briefly introduces the concept of Fermi liquid, before focusing on a detailed account of the Luttinger-liquid model. The mobile-impurity model will be introduced in the framework of the Luttinger liquid model afterwards, followed by a review of experimental works reported in the literature on the study of TLL physics. In Chapter 2, the principles of the experimental tunnelling spectroscopy technique are described. The second part of the thesis details the structure of the test device used in the experiment and its fabrication. In particular, we will discuss the intricacies of the three-dimensional EBL fabrication process developed specifically for this project. The setup and running of the measurement circuit will also be discussed in this part of the thesis, in the context of a prerequisite sample characterisation measurement. In the final part of the work, data from the main experiment will be presented and analysed, in search for the electron-electron interaction effects which are predicted by the theoretical discussions in the first chapter.
The Fermi liquid theory is a central concept in modern condensed matter physics used to describe conventional metals. A state of this universality class consists of well-defined quasiparticles, which occupy a finite number of states within a Fermi volume defined in momentum space. According to the Luttinger’s theorem, such a state encloses a Fermi volume proportional to the electron density modulo the filled bands if no symmetry is broken. In the past decades strong deviations from Fermi liquid theory have been observed in the scaling behavior of thermodynamic observables in different materials, among which are for instance cuprates and iron pnictides. This thesis is about two prototypical systems that can not be described by Fermi liquid theory. The first part of this work investigates two-dimensional effective models, which are in a Mott insulating state at half-filling and have a finite conductivity when doped with holes. In such a Mott insulating state, the charge carriers are strongly localized due to the Coulomb repulsion. Hence, strong correlations are assumed to have a strong impact on the formation of the ground state, also in the regime of small hole concentration. In a first project we have used a so-called spinon dopon mean-field theory to represent the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model with strong on-site repulsive interaction in effective degrees of freedom, in which the holes can be embedded into a quantum spin liquid. The corresponding SU(2) invariant ground state belongs to the class of fractionalized Fermi liquids. In a second project we investigate a quantum dimer model, an effective model based on a Hilbert space spanned by short range singlets and bound states of holes and spins. The focus here is on the calculation of the hole-part of the electron spectral function by using exact diagonalization and its comparison with two analytic methods, a diagrammatic computation based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation and a so-called two-mode approximation. The electron spectral function shows a similar analytic form in momentum space between nodal and antinodal point when compared to results from photoemission spectroscopy experiments on cuprates. Furthermore, in a subsequent work we calculate the exact ground state of the quantum dimer model along a certain parameter line. In order to analyze the behavior of the elctron spectral function when increasing the density of holes, we investigate the Fermi-Hubbard model in a current project using a dynamical mean-field approach. To solve the 4-site cluster impurity problem, we use a numerical renormalization group approach. However, numerical limitations force us to restrict the analysis to spin-polarized baths. According to the spectral data, the system is similar to the SU(2) invariant case at half-filling in a Mott insulating state and posseses a momentum-selective energy gap at finite doping. The topology of the Fermi surface shows a Lifshitz transition when increasing the hole concentration. Here, the curvature of the Fermi surface changes from electron- to hole-like. For comparison we apply the dynamical mean-field theory also to the quantum dimer model and observe that the electron spectral functions at finite doping are qualitatively similar to that of the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model. The second half of the work is about Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory, which is used to describe the low-energy effective degrees of freedom of one-dimensional systems. Here, we first discuss a conceptional extension of the operator-based bosonization theory for one-dimensional systems. This extension is especially suited for inhomogeneous one-dimensional systems. First, we investigate a one-dimensional system with a local interation potential and compute an exact solution of the single particle propagator at T = 0. The critical exponent of the single particle propagator has an unconventional form as a function of the microscopic Tomonaga-Luttinger parameters, which is not covered by the original Luttinger paradigm postulated by F. Duncan M. Haldane. In a second project on one-dimensional systems, we study the impact of scattering processes among bosonic low-energy excitations on the thermalization process. Such scattering processes are irrelevant on large length scales, however strongly affect the dynamics. In our analytic analysis we focus on a experimental setup, where a one-dimensional Bose gas is instantaneously splitted in two identical, however strongly correlated, halves of one-dimensional electronic systems. In the following, the corresponding non-equilibrium state runs through multiple regimes in time, such as a metastable prethermalization regime. However, above a certain threshold in time such scattering processes cause an effective thermalization of the system. In order to demonstrate this, we compute the kinetic equation in the Keldysh field integral formalism from a diagrammatic expansion based on a self-consistent Born approximation.
Since the advent of high-Tc cuprate superconductors in 1986, strongly correlated electron systems have attracted much attention. Since the cuprates are essentially two-dimensional, low-dimensional systems have moved into the focus of condensed-matter theory. From a theoretical point of view, one-dimensional systems are of particular interest because there are exact numerical and analytical methods which permit detailed studies and deep insights into the many-body problem. In the first part of this thesis, using the numerically exact methods Exact Diagonalization and the Density-Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG), we investigate the properties of the Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid which is the generic metallic state of matter in one dimension. In particular, we concentrate on the investigation of the so-called Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid parameter which determines the critical exponent α for the density of states near the Fermi energy. Experimental results for some quasi one-dimensional materials report α≳1, which would imply Kρ≲0.17, a value which cannot be reconciled with the bare Hubbard model where KρH≥0.5, i.e., αH≲1/8. We develop new accurate numerical methods to obtain Kρ and investigate how to obtain such small values for Kρ for slightly doped charge-density-wave insulators. In the second part of this thesis, using the Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA) as exact analytical method, we investigate the one-dimensional Hubbard model in the spindisordered regime, which is characterized by the temperature being much larger than the magnetic energy scale but small compared to the Mott–Hubbard gap. Our study is motivated by the controversy about the Mott–Hubbard insulator in infinite dimensions whose ground state is also spin-disordered. In this system the determination of the precise value of the critical interaction strength Uc where the Mott–Hubbard gap closes is still unsolved. Therefore, we provide an example of a Hubbard-type model with a disordered spin background which can be solved exactly. The thermodynamics of our model can be understood in terms of gapped charged excitations with an effective dispersion which are decoupled form the spin degrees of freedom; the latter contribute only entropically. An interpretation of this regime in terms of a putative interacting-electron system at zero temperature leads to a metal-insulator transition at a finite interaction strength above which the gap opens linearly. Our exact results indicate that the strong-coupling expansion of the ground-state energy cannot be used to locate Uc. However, the strong-coupling expansion of the gap permits a reliable extrapolation of the critical interaction strength.
Metallic quantum criticality is among the central themes in the understanding of correlated electronic systems, and converging results between analytical and numerical approaches are still under review. In this work, we develop a state-of-the-art large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulation technique and systematically investigate the itinerant quantum critical point on a 2D square lattice with antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations at wavevector [Formula: see text]-a problem that resembles the Fermi surface setup and low-energy antiferromagnetic fluctuations in high-Tc cuprates and other critical metals, which might be relevant to their non-Fermi-liquid behaviors. System sizes of [Formula: see text] ([Formula: see text]) are comfortably accessed, and the quantum critical scaling behaviors are revealed with unprecedented high precision. We found that the antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations introduce effective interactions among fermions and the fermions in return render the bare bosonic critical point into a different universality, different from both the bare Ising universality class and the Hertz-Mills-Moriya RPA prediction. At the quantum critical point, a finite anomalous dimension [Formula: see text] is observed in the bosonic propagator, and fermions at hotspots evolve into a non-Fermi liquid. In the antiferromagnetically ordered metallic phase, fermion pockets are observed as the energy gap opens up at the hotspots. These results bridge the recent theoretical and numerical developments in metallic quantum criticality and can serve as the stepping stone toward final understanding of the 2D correlated fermions interacting with gapless critical excitations.
Using higher-dimensional bosonization we study correlation functions of fermions with singular forward scattering. Following Bares and Wen [Phys. Rev. B 48, 8636 (1993)] we consider density-density interactions in d dimensions that diverge in Fourier space for small momentum transfers |q| as $|\mathbf{q}{|}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\eta}}$ with $\ensuremath{\eta}=2(d\ensuremath{-}1).$ In this case the single-particle Green's function shows Luttinger-liquid behavior. However, in contrast to d=1, in higher dimensions the singularity of the momentum distribution nk for wave vectors k close to the Fermi wave vector kF is characterized by a different exponent than the singularity of the density of states \ensuremath{\rho}(\ensuremath{\omega}) for frequencies \ensuremath{\omega} close to zero. We also calculate the irreducible polarization ${\ensuremath{\Pi}}_{\ensuremath{\star}}(\mathbf{q},\ensuremath{\omega})$ for $|\mathbf{q}|\ensuremath{\approx}{2k}_{F}.$ Whereas in the one-dimensional Tomonaga-Luttinger model ${\ensuremath{\Pi}}_{\ensuremath{\star}}(\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{2k}_{F}+q,\ensuremath{\omega})$ exhibits anomalous scaling, we show that in d>1 the leading singular corrections cancel. Thus, even though singular density-density interactions in d>1 lead to Luttinger liquid behavior of the single-particle Green's function, gauge invariant correlation functions such as the polarization or the conductivity show conventional Fermi-liquid behavior. We discuss consequences for the effect of disorder on higher-dimensional Luttinger liquids.