The Roton Fermi Liquid

Abstract

We introduce and analyze a novel metallic phase of two-dimensional (2d) electrons, the Roton Fermi Liquid (RFL), which, in contrast to the Landau Fermi liquid, supports both gapless fermionic and bosonic quasiparticle excitations. The RFL is accessed using a re-formulation of 2d electrons consisting of fermionic quasiparticles and $hc/2e$ vortices interacting with a mutual long-ranged statistical interaction. In the presence of a strong vortex-antivortex (i.e. roton) hopping term, the RFL phase emerges as an exotic yet eminently tractable new quantum ground state. The RFL phase exhibits a ``Bose surface'' of gapless roton excitations describing transverse current fluctuations, has off-diagonal quasi-long-ranged order (ODQLRO) at zero temperature (T=0), but is not superconducting, having zero superfluid density and no Meissner effect. The electrical resistance {\it vanishes} as $T\to 0$ with a power of temperature (and frequency), $R(T)\sim T^{\gamma }$ (with $\gamma >1$), independent of the impurity concentration. The RFL phase also has a full Fermi surface of quasiparticle excitations just as in a Landau Fermi liquid. Electrons can, however, scatter anomalously from rotonic "current fluctuations'' and "superconducting fluctuations'', leading to "hot" and "cold" spots. Fermionic quasiparticles dominate the Hall electrical transport. We also discuss instabilities of the RFL to a conventional Fermi liquid and a superconductor. Precisely {\it at} the instability into the Fermi liquid state, the exponent $\gamma =1$, so that $R(T)\sim T$. Upon entering the superconducting state the anomalous quasiparticle scattering is strongly suppressed. We discuss how the RFL phenomenology might apply to the cuprates.

43 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of the cuprate superconductors
• Large N expansion for frustrated and doped quantum antiferromagnets
• Understanding correlated electron systems by a classification of Mott insulators

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• Paired electron pockets in the hole-doped cuprates
• Effective action for vortex dynamics in clean d-wave superconductors
• Dual vortex theory of doped Mott insulators
• Possible realization of the Exciton Bose Liquid phase in a hard-core boson model with ring-only exchange interactions
• Theoretical Analysis of Drag Resistance in Amorphous Thin Films Exhibiting Superconductor-Insulator-Transition
• Chiral vortex-line liquid of three-dimensional interacting Bose systems with moat dispersion