Pomeranchuk Instability in a non-Fermi Liquid from Holography

Abstract

The Pomeranchuk instability, in which an isotropic Fermi surface distorts and becomes anisotropic due to strong interactions, is a possible mechanism for the growing number of experimental systems which display transport properties that differ along the $x$ and $y$ axes. We show here that the gauge-gravity duality can be used to describe such an instability in fermionic systems. Our holographic model consists of fermions in a background which describes the causal propagation of a massive neutral spin-two field in an asymptotically AdS spacetime. The Fermi surfaces in the boundary theory distort spontaneously and become anisotropic once the neutral massive spin-two field develops a normalizable mode in the bulk. Analysis of the fermionic correlators reveals that the low-lying fermionic excitations are non-Fermi liquid-like both before and after the Fermi surface shape distortion. Further, the spectral weight along the Fermi surface is angularly dependent and can be made to vanish along certain directions.

Updated version to appear in PRD. New version has WKB analysis of spectral intensity in ordered phase

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Critical Quadrupole Fluctuations and Collective Modes in Iron Pnictide Superconductors
• AdS/CFT and Landau Fermi liquids
• Anisotropic Fermi surface from holography
• Enhancement of Critical Temperature of a Striped Holographic Superconductor
• Nematicity-enhanced superconductivity in systems with a non-Fermi liquid behavior
• Holographic RG flows with nematic IR phases
• Revisiting the Fermi Surface in Density Functional Theory
• Pomeranchuk instabilities in holographic metals