Quantum Critical Behavior of the Cluster Glass Phase

Abstract

In disordered itinerant magnets with arbitrary symmetry of the order parameter, the conventional quantum critical point between the ordered phase and the paramagnetic Fermi-liquid (PMFL) is destroyed due to the formation of an intervening cluster glass (CG) phase. In this Letter we discuss the quantum critical behavior at the CG-PMFL transition for systems with continuous symmetry. We show that fluctuations due to quantum Griffiths anomalies induce a first-order transition from the PMFL at T=0, while at higher temperatures a conventional continuous transition is restored. This behavior is a generic consequence of enhanced non-Ohmic dissipation caused by a broad distribution of energy scales within any quantum Griffiths phase in itinerant systems.

v1: 4+epsilon pages, 2 figures; v2: 4 pages, 1 figure, improved discussion, version accepted to PRL

References in corpus (4)

• Rare region effects at classical, quantum, and non-equilibrium phase transitions
• Disorder-Driven Non-Fermi Liquid Behavior of Correlated Electrons
• Quantum Griffiths effects in itinerant Heisenberg magnets
• Absence of conventional quantum phase transitions in itinerant systems with disorder

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Effects of dissipation on a quantum critical point with disorder
• Infinite-randomness quantum critical points induced by dissipation
• Bad-metal behavior reveals Mott quantum criticality in doped Hubbard models
• Localization of overdamped bosonic modes and transport in strange metals
• A theoretical study of the cluster glass-Kondo-magnetic disordered alloys
• Strange metals and planckian transport in a gapless phase from spatially random interactions