Higgs criticality in a two-dimensional metal

Abstract

We analyze a candidate theory for the strange metal near optimal hole-doping in the cuprate superconductors. The theory contains a quantum phase transition between metals with large and small Fermi surfaces of spinless fermions carrying the electromagnetic charge of the electron, but the transition does not directly involve any broken global symmetries. The two metals have emergent SU(2) and U(1) gauge fields respectively, and the transition is driven by the condensation of a real Higgs field, carrying a finite lattice momentum and an adjoint SU(2) gauge charge. This Higgs field measures the local antiferromagnetic correlations in a "rotating reference frame". We propose a global phase diagram around this Higgs transition, and describe its relationship to a variety of recent experiments on the cuprate superconductors.

30 pages, 7 figures; (v2) added new figure

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Memory matrix theory of magnetotransport in strange metals
• Pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors confined by Fermi surface topology
• Fractionalized Fermi liquid with bosonic chargons as a candidate for the pseudogap metal
• Modern Physics of the Condensed State: Strong Correlations and Quantum Topology
• Domes of $T_c$ in single-band and multiband superconductors with finite-range attractive interactions