Strange or bad metallic transport, defined by incompatibility with the conventional quasiparticle picture, is a theme common to many strongly correlated materials, including high-temperature superconductors. The Hubbard model represents a minimal starting point for modeling strongly correlated systems. Here we demonstrate strange metallic transport in the doped two-dimensional Hubbard model using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo calculations. Over a wide range of doping, we observe resistivities exceeding the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit with linear temperature dependence. The temperatures of our calculations extend to as low as 1/40 of the noninteracting bandwidth, placing our findings in the degenerate regime relevant to experimental observations of strange metallicity. Our results provide a foundation for connecting theories of strange metals to models of strongly correlated materials.
Good metals are characterized by diffusive transport of coherent quasiparticle states and the resistivity is much less than the Mott-Ioffe-Regel (MIR) limit,
e2ha, where
a is the lattice constant. In bad metals, such as many strongly correlated electron materials, the resistivity exceeds the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit and the transport is incoherent in nature. Hartnoll, loosely motivated by holographic duality (AdS/CFT correspondence) in string theory, recently proposed a lower bound to the charge-diffusion constant, $D\ensuremath{\gtrsim}\ensuremath{\hbar}{v}_{F}^{2}/({k}_{B}T)$, in the incoherent regime of transport, where
vF is the Fermi velocity and
T the temperature. Using dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) we calculate the charge-diffusion constant in a single band Hubbard model at half filling. We show that in the strongly correlated regime the Hartnoll's bound is violated in the crossover region between the coherent Fermi-liquid region and the incoherent (bad metal) local moment region. The violation occurs even when the bare Fermi velocity
vF is replaced by its low-temperature renormalized value
vF∗. The bound is satisfied at all temperatures in the weakly and moderately correlated systems as well as in strongly correlated systems in the high-temperature region where the resistivity is close to linear in temperature. Our calculated charge-diffusion constant, in the incoherent regime of transport, also strongly violates a proposed quantum limit of spin diffusion, ${D}_{s}\ensuremath{\sim}1.3\ensuremath{\hbar}/m$, where
m is the fermion mass, experimentally observed and theoretically calculated in a cold degenerate Fermi gas in the unitary limit of scattering.
Bad metals display transport behavior that differs from what is commonly seen in ordinary metals. One of the most significant differences is a resistivity that is linear in temperature and rises to well above the Ioffe-Regel limit (where the mean-free path is equal to the lattice spacing). Using an exact Kubo formula, we show that a linear resistivity naturally occurs for many systems when they are in an incoherent intermediate-temperature state. First, we provide a simple analytic model to give intuition for this phenomenology. Then, we verify the analytic arguments with numerical calculations for a simplified version of the Hubbard model which is solved with dynamical mean-field theory. Similar features have also been seen in Hubbard models, where they can begin at even lower temperatures due to the formation of resilient quasiparticles.
Strongly correlated metals often display anomalous transport, including T-linear resistivity above the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit. We introduce a tractable microscopic model for bad metals, by restoring in the well-known Hubbard model-with hopping t and on-site repulsion U-a "screened Coulomb" interaction between charge densities that decays exponentially with spatial separation. This interaction lifts the extensive degeneracy in the spectrum of the t=0 Hubbard model, allowing us to fully characterize the small t electric, thermal, and thermoelectric transport in our strongly correlated model. Throughout the phase diagram we observe T-linear resistivity above the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit, together with strong violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law and a large thermopower that can undergo sign change.
Recent progress in extremely correlated Fermi liquid theory (ECFL) and the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) enables us to accurately compute in the $d\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ limit the resistivity of the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model after setting $J\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$. This is also the $U=\ensuremath{\infty}$ Hubbard model. Since
J is set to zero, our study isolates the dynamical effects of the single occupation constraint enforced by the projection operator originally introduced by Gutzwiller. We study three densities
n=.75,.8,.85 that correspond to a range between the overdoped and optimally doped Mott insulating state. We delineate four distinct regimes separated by three crossovers, which are characterized by different behaviors of the resistivity $\ensuremath{\rho}$. We find at the lowest temperature
T a Gutzwiller correlated Fermi liquid regime with $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\propto}{T}^{2}$ extending up to an effective Fermi temperature that is dramatically suppressed from the noninteracting value by the proximity to half filling, $n\ensuremath{\sim}1$. This is followed by a Gutzwiller correlated strange metal regime with $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\propto}(T\ensuremath{-}{T}_{0})$, i.e., a linear resistivity extrapolating back to $\ensuremath{\rho}=0$ at a positive
T0. At a higher temperature scale this crosses over into the bad metal regime with $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\propto}(T+{T}_{1})$, i.e., a linear resistivity extrapolating back to a finite resistivity at
T=0 and passing through the Ioffe-Regel-Mott value where the mean free path is a few lattice constants. This regime finally gives way to the high
T metal regime, where we find $\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\propto}T$, i.e., a linear resistivity extrapolating back to zero at
T=0. The present work emphasizes the first two, i.e., the two lowest temperature regimes, where the availability of an analytical ECFL theory is of help in identifying the changes in related variables entering the resistivity formula that accompanies the onset of linear resistivity, and the numerically exact DMFT helps to validate the results. We also examine thermodynamical variables such as the magnetic susceptibility, compressibility, heat capacity, and entropy and correlate changes in these with the change in resistivity. This exercise casts valuable light on the nature of charge and spin correlations in the Gutzwiller correlated strange metal regime, which has features in common with the physically relevant strange metal phase seen in strongly correlated matter.
In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the Extremely Correlated Fermi Liquid (ECFL) phenomenon within the
U=∞ Hubbard model. Our approach involves deriving equations of motion for the single-particle Green's function
G and its associated self-energy
Σ, which involves the product of the bosonic correlation function comprising both density (
DN) and spin (
DS) correlations with
G. By solving these equations self-consistently, we explore the behavior of
G,
DN, and
DS as functions of frequency, temperature, and hole concentration. Our results reveal distinct coherent and incoherent Fermi liquid regimes characterized by the presence or absence of quasiparticle excitations. Additionally, we analyze the intrinsic dc resistivity
ρ(T), observing a crossover from
T2 to linear behavior with increasing temperature. Our findings delineate Fermi liquid, quantum incoherent, and `classical' regimes in strongly correlated systems, emphasizing the importance of quantum diffusive local charge and spin fluctuations.