Strange connections to strange metals
Hong Liu
Liu replies: While many ingenious ideas have been advanced to explain the strange-metal phase, the community has not reached a consensus, and many of the phase’s properties remain mysterious. Philip W. Anderson’s hidden Fermi liquid theory, arguably a most ambitious attempt, has provided a useful lens to view various aspects of the phase, but further developments are worthwhile.As described in my Quick Study, a key obstacle in the pursuit to explain the strange metal phase is the lack of a suitable mathematical framework to characterize “quantum soups”—strongly interacting, dense quantum matter whose constituents have lost their individuality. Holographic duality has now provided such a framework, although only for the class of systems that have gravity duals. It does for those quantum soups what Boltzmann equations do for a dilute gas of quasiparticles: It enables one to calculate reliably all equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties.At short distances, holographic systems are conformal, Lorentz invariant, and often supersymmetric, all of which make them seem poor models for real-life condensed-matter systems. Those symmetries, however, are all destroyed at long distances if a temperature or a chemical potential is turned on. The surprise of the past few years is that despite significant differences in short-distance details, at long distances most states of matter that have been understood—superfluids, Fermi liquids, magnets, stripes, and so on—can be described in terms of dual gravity systems. Such insensitivity to microscopic detail gives hope that the striking parallels in macroscopic behavior found between black holes and strange metals are not accidents, and gravity may help us decipher the mysteries of strange metals.I thank Anderson for emphasizing other anomalies exhibited by the strange-metal phase of cuprates that I did not have space to mention. He is correct that the holographic approach has not yet produced a model that could account for all anomalous properties. However, the power-law dependence of photoemission spectra on energy, his last bullet point, is a hallmark of holographic strange metals. I discussed that point in the last part of the Quick Study, in terms of the power-law temperature dependence of scattering rates. Such power laws follow from the semilocal property emphasized in the second-to-last paragraph.Whether or not one finds a “conventional” explanation for strange metals, connections between the physics of strange metals and black holes are worth exploring. They hint at a new paradigm for thinking about strongly correlated quantum soups. As an added bonus, we may also obtain new insights into quantum gravity from advances in condensed-matter physics.© 2013 American Institute of Physics.
Physics Today•Mar 29, 2013•1 citation