Chiral symmetry breaking and violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in underdoped cuprates

Abstract

We propose that the recently observed violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in the normal state of underdoped cuprates is caused by spin-charge separation and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in a (2+1)-dimensional system consisting of massless Dirac fermions, charged bosons and a gauge field. While the d-wave spinon gap vanishes at the Fermi points, the nodal fermions acquire a finite mass due to strong gauge fluctuations. This mass provides a gap below which no free fermions can be excited. This implies that there is not a residual linear term for the thermal conductivity, in good agreement with experiments. Other physical implications of the CSB are also discussed.

13 pages, no figures

References in corpus (2)

• Breakdown of Fermi-liquid theory in a cuprate superconductor
• Violation of the Wiedemann-Franz Law in a Large-N Solution of the t-J Model

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Effect of gauge boson mass on chiral symmetry breaking in QED${}_3$
• Confinement of matter fields in compact (2+1)-dimensional QED theory of high-$T_c$ superconductors
• Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in QED${}_3$ at finite density and impurity potential
• Unconventional behavior of Dirac fermions in three-dimensional gauge theory
• Effects of random potentials in three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics
• Deconfined quantum criticality driven by Dirac fermions in SU(2) antiferromagnets
• Confinement induced by fermion damping in three-dimensional QED
• Infrared behavior of dynamical fermion mass generation in QED${}_3$
• Effects of the Pseudo-Chern-Simons action for strongly correlated electrons in the plane
• Renormalization of fermion velocity in finite temperature QED_{3}
• Influence of Fermion Velocity Renormalization on Dynamical Mass Generation in QED${}_3$