Geometric frustration produces long-sought Bose metal phase of quantum matter

Abstract

Two of the most prominent phases of bosonic matter are the superfluid with perfect flow and the insulator with no flow. A now decades-old mystery unexpectedly arose when experimental observations indicated that bosons could organize into the formation of an entirely different intervening third phase: the Bose metal with dissipative flow. The most viable theory for such a Bose metal to date invokes the use of the extrinsic property of impurity-based disorder; however, a generic intrinsic quantum Bose metal state is still lacking. We propose a universal homogeneous theory for a Bose metal in which geometric frustration confines the essential quantum coherence to a lower dimension. The result is a gapless insulator characterized by dissipative flow that vanishes in the low-energy limit. This failed insulator exemplifies a frustration-dominated regime that is only enhanced by additional scattering sources at low energy and therefore produces a Bose metal that thrives under realistic experimental conditions.

19 pages, 5 figures, supplementary material included

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms
• Electron-phonon effects on spin-orbit split bands of two dimensional systems
• Low energy physics of interacting bosons with a moat spectrum, and the implications for condensed matter and cold nuclear matter

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Infinite critical boson non-Fermi liquid
• Probing a Bose Metal via Electrons: Inescapable non-Fermi liquid scattering and pseudogap physics
• Conductivity of lattice bosons at high temperatures
• Geometric inhibition of superflow in single-layer graphene suggests a staggered-flux superconductivity in bilayer and trilayer graphene
• Ring-exchange physics in a chain of three-level ions
• Infinite critical boson induced non-Fermi liquid in $d=3-\epsilon$ dimensions
• Frustrated Bose ladder with extended range density-density interaction