Anomalous Local Criticality in Heavy Fermion Metals from Holography

Abstract

We propose a holographic theory to explain numbers of anomalous critical phenomena observed in certain heavy-fermion metals, e.g. $\mathrm{CeC}{\mathrm{u}}_{5.9}\mathrm{A}{\mathrm{u}}_{0.1}$ and $\mathrm{YbR}{\mathrm{h}}_2(\mathrm{S}{\mathrm{i}}_{0.95}\mathrm{G}{\mathrm{e}}_{0.05}{)}_2$, which are incompatible with any conventional spin-density-wave quantum critical point theory. We show that the non-Gaussian nature of the fixed point from holography plays an essential role in the physics of these materials near a quantum critical point, which is not in the same universality class of the spin-density-wave type fixed point. The critical spin fluctuations at the non-Gaussian fixed point are strongly anisotropic, localized in spatial directions and critical in temporal direction with critical exponent 2/3 in frequency over temperature dependence at low temperature. The local critical exponent tends to unity which leads to a constant spin relaxation rate in the quantum critical regime at high temperature. The stability of the fixed point is also discussed.

RevTeX 5 pages, no figure; v2: typos corrected, updated to the final version published in MPLB

References in corpus (2)

• Minkowski-space correlators in AdS/CFT correspondence: recipe and applications
• Quantum Criticality in Heavy Fermion Metals

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Taking a critical look at holographic critical matter