Surface Waves in Fermi Liquids

A. H. Castro Neto, Eduardo Fradkin

We bosonize the low energy excitations of Fermi liquids in any number of dimensions in the limit of long wavelengths. The bosons are a coherent superposition of electron-hole pairs and are related with the displacements of the Fermi surface in some arbitrary direction. A coherent-state path integral for the bosonized theory is derived and it is shown to represent histories of the shape of the Fermi surface. The Landau theory of Fermi liquids can be obtained from the formalism in the absence of nesting of the Fermi surface and singular interactions. We show that the Landau equation for sound waves is exact in the semiclassical approximation for the bosons.

Henning Esbensen, G. F. Bertsch

Rahul Nandkishore, Max A. Metlitski, T. Senthil

We present a fractionalized metallic phase which is indistinguishable from the Fermi liquid in conductivity and thermodynamics, but is sharply distinct in one-electron properties, such as the electron spectral function. We dub this phase the ``orthogonal metal.'' The orthogonal metal and the transition to it from the Fermi liquid are naturally described using a slave-particle representation wherein the electron is expressed as a product of a fermion and a slave Ising spin. We emphasize that when the slave spins are disordered, the result is not a Mott insulator (as erroneously assumed in the prior literature), but rather the orthogonal metal. We construct prototypical ground-state wave functions for the orthogonal metal by modifying the Jastrow factor of Slater-Jastrow wave functions that describe ordinary Fermi liquids. We further demonstrate that the transition from the Fermi liquid to the orthogonal metal can, in some circumstances, provide a simple example of a continuous destruction of a Fermi surface with a critical Fermi surface appearing right at the critical point. We present exactly soluble models that realize an orthogonal metal phase, and the phase transition to the Fermi liquid. These models thus provide valuable solvable examples for phase transitions associated with the death of a Fermi surface.

Katsuhiko Nagai, Peter W�lfle

Walter Metzner, D. Rohe, Sabine Andergassen

Electron-electron interactions can induce Fermi surface deformations which break the point-group symmetry of the lattice structure of the system. In the vicinity of such a "Pomeranchuk instability" the Fermi surface is easily deformed by anisotropic perturbations, and exhibits enhanced collective fluctuations. We show that critical Fermi surface fluctuations near a d-wave Pomeranchuk instability in two dimensions lead to large anisotropic decay rates for single-particle excitations, which destroy Fermi-liquid behavior over the whole surface except at the Brillouin zone diagonal.

Jagdish Prasad Singh