Non-Fermi-liquid d-wave metal phase of strongly interacting electrons

Abstract

Developing a theoretical framework for conducting electronic fluids qualitatively distinct from those described by Landau's Fermi-liquid theory is of central importance to many outstanding problems in condensed matter physics. One such problem is that, above the transition temperature and near optimal doping, high-transition-temperature copper-oxide superconductors exhibit `strange metal' behaviour that is inconsistent with being a traditional Landau Fermi liquid. Indeed, a microscopic theory of a strange-metal quantum phase could shed new light on the interesting low-temperature behaviour in the pseudogap regime and on the d-wave superconductor itself. Here we present a theory for a specific example of a strange metal---the 'd-wave metal'. Using variational wavefunctions, gauge theoretic arguments, and ultimately large-scale density matrix renormalization group calculations, we show that this remarkable quantum phase is the ground state of a reasonable microscopic Hamiltonian---the usual t-J model with electron kinetic energy $t$ and two-spin exchange $J$ supplemented with a frustrated electron `ring-exchange' term, which we here examine extensively on the square lattice two-leg ladder. These findings constitute an explicit theoretical example of a genuine non-Fermi-liquid metal existing as the ground state of a realistic model.

22 pages, 12 figures: 6 pages, 7 figures of main text + 16 pages, 5 figures of Supplementary Information; this is approximately the version published in Nature, minus various subedits in the main text

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• Entanglement entropy of critical spin liquids
• D-wave correlated Critical Bose Liquids in two dimensions
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Chiral Mott Insulators, Meissner Effect, and Laughlin States in Quantum Ladders
• Quasi-Local Strange Metal
• Entanglement entropy of the $\nu =1/2$ composite fermion non-Fermi liquid state
• A continuous Mott transition between a metal and a quantum spin liquid
• Cluster Luttinger liquids and emergent supersymmetric conformal critical points in the one-dimensional soft-shoulder Hubbard model
• UV/IR Mixing In Non-Fermi Liquids: Higher-Loop Corrections In Different Energy Ranges
• Spin liquid phase in the semiclassical theory of the Heisenberg model on an anisotropic triangular lattice with ring exchange
• Emergent Fermi sea in a system of interacting bosons
• Fractionalized gapless quantum vortex liquids
• Hole-doping driven antiparallel magnetic order underlying the superconducting and pseudogap states in high-temperature cuprate superconductor