A strange metal state appears in many strongly correlated materials from the cuprates, pnictides, and twisted bilayer graphenes to even bosonic systems. Enormous efforts are being made to unravel the nature of the non-Fermi liquid (NFL) which underlies the strange metallicity, yet progress is rather slow. Understanding the NFL behavior is crucial, in addition to its importance in replacing the Fermi liquid paradigm, in that NFL is the normal state from which new states of matter emerge like high temperature superconductivity. Here, we report the appearance of an NFL phase in a discontinuous metal-NFL-insulator transition in a ``non-engineered'' Hamiltonian of the Holstein model away from half-filling. The discontinuity of the phase transition between NFL and Fermi liquid metal renders the ground state at the phase boundary a mixture between them over an extended range like the extended criticality observed in cuprates and other quantum materials. The dynamical mean-field theory was employed in combination with Wilson's numerical renormalization group technique. We identify the origin of the NFL metal phase as the opening of a spin gap in the absence of a charge gap. Also, strong lattice fluctuations emerge at the boundary which should enhance superconductivity.
A strange metal state appears in many strongly correlated materials from the cuprates, pnictides, and twisted bilayer graphenes to even bosonic systems. Enormous efforts are being made to unravel the nature of the non-Fermi liquid (NFL) which underlies the strange metallicity, yet progress is rather slow. Understanding the NFL behavior is crucial, in addition to its importance in replacing the Fermi liquid paradigm, in that NFL is the normal state from which new states of matter emerge like high temperature superconductivity. Here, we report the appearance of an NFL phase in a discontinuous metal-NFL-insulator transition in a ``non-engineered'' Hamiltonian of the Holstein model away from half-filling. The discontinuity of the phase transition between NFL and Fermi liquid metal renders the ground state at the phase boundary a mixture between them over an extended range like the extended criticality observed in cuprates and other quantum materials. The dynamical mean-field theory was employed in combination with Wilson's numerical renormalization group technique. We identify the origin of the NFL metal phase as the opening of a spin gap in the absence of a charge gap. Also, strong lattice fluctuations emerge at the boundary which should enhance superconductivity.
Non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior and strange metallicity, often marked by resistivity linear in temperature and the breakdown of Fermi liquid quasiparticles, are recurring themes in strongly correlated quantum materials, ranging from high-temperature cuprates to twisted van der Waals heterostructures. Enormous efforts are being made to uncover the origin of NFL underlying strange metallicity, yet progress remains slow. Here, we report appearance of an NFL phase in a discontinuous metal-NFL-insulator transition of the Holstein model away from half-filling. The NFL appears as a distinct ground state of finite regime in addition to the metal and insulator states in a phase diagram, not as a consequence of quantum criticality of a continuous transition. Also, the discontinuity of the metal-NFL transition produces a mixture between the two phases along the phase boundary to exhibit a two-fluid kind strange metallicity. The dynamical mean-field theory was employed with Wilson’s numerical renormalization group in infinite dimensions. We trace the NFL phase to a spin gap opening in the absence of a charge gap. This offers an intriguing route to understanding the NFL and intertwined superconductivity in correlated quantum materials.
Several years ago, there were rumors that metals might have an awkward cousin, whom people are sort of expecting but have never made acquaintance. As though he/she shares metallic features -- conducting -- but is distinctively different and even invisible if one approaches him/her in conventional manners -- acquiring no Fermi surface or quasiparticles. Of course, the real content of such metaphor ammounts to the fact that there exists new quantum metallic state that conducts electricity but is orthogonal to the established paradigm of Landau's Fermi-liquid (FL), and such state might hold the key of understanding the perplexing experimental observations of quantum metals that are beyond FL -- dubbed non-Fermi-liquid (nFL) -- ranging from the Cu- and Fe-based oxides, heavy fermion compounds to the recently discovered twisted graphene heterostructures. However, to realize such exotic state of matter, at least theoretically, one would need to construct a lattice model and solve it with unbiased quantum many-body machinery. Here, we achieve this goal by designing a 2D lattice model comprised of matter fields coupled with dynamic Z2 gauge fields, and studying it with sign-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We find as the bosonic matter fields become disordered, the system reacts with changing its nature from the conventional normal metal of FL with proper Fermi surface to an orthogonal metal of nFL without Fermi surface and quasiparticle and yet still responds to external perturbation with hidden fermionic degrees of freedom. Such a quantum phase transition from a normal metal to an orthogonal metal has never been seen before and certainly violated the Luttinger's theorem. These results are calling for the establishment of new paradigm of quantum metals and their transition with conventional ones. Rumor turns out to be true, as always, that metals indeed have an awkaward cousin.
Quantum criticality, a manifestation of emergent scale invariance in electron wavefunctions arises from intricate many-body quantum entanglement. One of the natural venues for the criticality is clean undoped Dirac semimetals, known as a marginally-renormalized critical phase. The ground state is only slightly modified from the Slater-type product wavefunction because the scatterings from weak disorder and Coulomb interactions are suppressed. Here, using the renormalization group (RG) analysis, we show that a novel class of quantum criticality appears in Dirac semimetals when the disorder strength becomes sufficiently strong in the presence of Coulomb interactions so that a quantum phase transition from the marginally-renormalized critical phase to a disorder-dominated phase arises. The ground state at the critical point is a quantum critical non-Fermi liquid (NFL), characterized by the properties of strongly entangled low-energy states such as the absence of quasi-particles. Near the critical point, unusually wide temperature regions with NFL behaviors emerge.
Strange Metal Solution in the Diagrammatic Theory for the 2d Hubbard Model
We show that the numerically exact bold-line diagrammatic theory for the 2d Hubbard model exhibits a non-Fermi-liquid (NFL) strange metal state, which is connected to the SYK NFL in the strong-interaction limit. The solution for the doped system features the expected phenomenology with the NFL near half-filling at strong couplings and in a wide temperature range enclosed by the atomic state at high temperatures and a Fermi liquid at low temperatures. We demonstrate, however, that this behavior in the weakly doped regime is due to the unphysical branch of the Luttinger-Ward functional. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the NFL physics is realized at larger doping.
Orthogonal metal is a new quantum metallic state that conducts electricity but acquires no Fermi surface (FS) or quasiparticles, and hence orthogonal to the established paradigm of Landau’s Fermi-liquid (FL). Such a state may hold the key of understanding the perplexing experimental observations of quantum metals that are beyond FL, i.e., dubbed non-Fermi-liquid (nFL), ranging from the Cu- and Fe-based oxides, heavy fermion compounds to the recently discovered twisted graphene heterostructures. However, to fully understand such an exotic state of matter, at least theoretically, one would like to construct a lattice model and to solve it with unbiased quantum many-body machinery. Here we achieve this goal by designing a 2D lattice model comprised of fermionic and bosonic matter fields coupled with dynamic ℤ2 gauge fields, and obtain its exact properties with sign-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We find that as the bosonic matter fields become disordered, with the help of deconfinement of the ℤ2 gauge fields, the system reacts with changing its nature from the conventional normal metal with an FS to an orthogonal metal of nFL without FS and quasiparticles and yet still responds to magnetic probe like an FL. Such a quantum phase transition from a normal metal to an orthogonal metal, with its electronic and magnetic spectral properties revealed, is calling for the establishment of new paradigm of quantum metals and their transition with conventional ones.
In this study, we investigate the emergence of a topological non-Fermi liquid (NFL) phase in a modified Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chain model subjected to long-range interactions characterized by the Hatsugai-Kohmoto (HK) model. While Fermi liquid theory has been instrumental in understanding low-temperature properties of metals, it fails to account for the complex behaviors exhibited by strongly correlated systems, where interactions lead to emergent phenomena such as non-Fermi liquid behavior. Our analysis reveals that the SSH-HK model supports a rich ground state phase diagram, exhibiting distinct NFL phases marked by many-body Zak phases of $2\ensuremath{\pi}$ and 0, corresponding to topological and trivial NFL states, respectively. We demonstrate that the topological NFL state manifests unique electronic polarization characteristics akin to those in the noninteracting SSH model. Through exact diagonalization of the interacting SSH-HK Hamiltonian, we explore the spectral functions and density of states, revealing significant departures from traditional quasiparticle behavior in various particle number sectors. Our findings extend the understanding of topological non-Fermi liquids and their potential implications for high-temperature superconductivity and other correlated electron systems, highlighting the intricate interplay between topology and strong electron correlations.