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Published January 3, 2013 | Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Non-Fermi liquid d-wave metal phase of strongly interacting electrons

Abstract

Developing a theoretical framework for conducting electronic fluids qualitatively distinct from those described by Landau's celebrated Fermi liquid theory is of central importance to many outstanding problems in condensed matter physics. Perhaps the most important such pursuit is a full microscopic characterization of the high-T_c cuprate superconductors, where the so-called "strange metal" behavior above T_c near optimal doping is inconsistent with being a traditional Landau Fermi liquid. Indeed, a microscopic theory of such a strange metal quantum phase could possibly shed new light on the interesting low-temperature behavior in the pseudogap regime and on the d-wave superconductor itself. Here, we present a theory for a specific example of a strange metal, which we term the "d-wave metal." Using variational wave functions, gauge theoretic arguments, and ultimately large-scale DMRG calculations, we establish compelling evidence that this remarkable quantum phase is the ground state of a reasonable microscopic Hamiltonian: the venerable t-J model supplemented with a frustrated electron ring-exchange term, which we study extensively here on the two-leg ladder. These findings constitute one of the first explicit examples of a genuine non-Fermi liquid metal existing as the ground state of a realistic model.

Additional Information

© 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. Received 01 August 2012. Accepted 29 October 2012. Published online 19 December 2012. We thank T. Senthil, R. Kaul, L. Balents, S. Sachdev, A. Vishwanath and P. Lee for discussions. This work was supported by the NSF under the KITP grant PHY05-51164 and the MRSEC programme under award number DMR-1121053 (H.-C.J.), the NSF under grants DMR-1101912 (M.S.B., R.V.M., J.R.G. and M.P.A.F.), DMR-1056536 (M.S.B.), DMR-0906816 and DMR-1205734 (D.N.S.), DMR-0907145 (O.I.M.), and by the Caltech Institute of Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (O.I.M. and M.P.A.F.). We also acknowledge support from the Center for Scientific Computing from the CNSI, MRL: an NSF MRSEC award (DMR-1121053), and an NSF grant (CNS-0960316). Author Contributions: All authors made significant contributions to the research underlying this paper. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Attached Files

Submitted - 1207.6608v1.pdf

Supplemental Material - nature11732-s1.pdf

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August 19, 2023
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