Strange Metallic Behaviour and the Thermodynamics of Charged Dilatonic Black Holes

Stranger than Metals

Although the resistivity in traditional metals increases with temperature, its $T$ dependence vanishes at low or high temperature, albeit for different reasons. Here, we review a class of materials, known as \lq strange' metals, that can violate both principles. In materials exhibiting such behavior, the change in slope of the resistivity as the mean free path drops below the lattice constant, or as $T \rightarrow 0$, can be imperceptible, suggesting complete continuity between the charge carriers at low and high $T$. Since particles cannot scatter at length scales shorter than the interatomic…

Zero Sound in Strange Metallic Holography

One way to model the strange metal phase of certain materials is via a holographic description in terms of probe D-branes in a Lifshitz spacetime, characterised by a dynamical exponent z. The background geometry is dual to a strongly-interacting quantum critical theory while the probe D-branes are dual to a finite density of charge carriers that can exhibit the characteristic properties of strange metals. We compute holographically the low-frequency and low-momentum form of the charge density and current retarded Green's functions in these systems for massless charge carriers. The results reve…

The novel metallic states of the cuprates: Fermi liquids with topological order, and strange metals

This article is based on a talk by S.S. at the Nambu Memorial Symposium at the University of Chicago. We review ideas on the nature of the metallic states of the hole-doped cuprate high temperature superconductors, with an emphasis on the connections between the Luttinger theorem for the size of the Fermi surface, topological quantum field theories (TQFTs), and critical theories involving changes in the size of the Fermi surface. We begin with the derivation of the Luttinger theorem for a Fermi liquid, using momentum balance during a process of flux-insertion in a lattice electronic model with…

From black holes to strange metals

Since the mid-eighties there has been an accumulation of metallic materials whose thermodynamic and transport properties differ significantly from those predicted by Fermi liquid theory. Examples of these so-called non-Fermi liquids include the strange metal phase of high transition temperature cuprates, and heavy fermion systems near a quantum phase transition. We report on a class of non-Fermi liquids discovered using gauge/gravity duality. The low energy behavior of these non-Fermi liquids is shown to be governed by a nontrivial infrared (IR) fixed point which exhibits nonanalytic scaling b…

面向哲学家和物理学家的全息奇异金属

Holographic Strange Metals for Philosophers and Physicists

本文介绍奇异金属的物理与哲学，其异常电热性质无法用标准凝聚态物理描述，只能通过全息对偶（反德西特时空中的四维黑洞）解释，并探讨实验证据及实在论解释引发的哲学问题。

Quantum criticality of granular SYK matter

We consider granular quantum matter defined by Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) dots coupled via random one-body hopping. Within the framework of Schwarzian field theory, we identify a zero temperature quantum phase transition between an insulating phase at weak and a metallic phase at strong hopping. The critical hopping strength scales inversely with the number of degrees of freedom on the dots. The increase of temperature out of either phase induces a crossover into a regime of strange metallic behavior.

Dyonic Gubser-Rocha 黑洞的热电输运

Thermo-electric Transport of Dyonic Gubser-Rocha Black Holes

该研究扩展了 Gubser-Rocha 模型，提出带磁场的 dyonic 黑洞解，分析其热电输运性质，发现电阻率在低温呈 T-线性，强动量弛豫和强磁场下偏离，霍尔角呈 T-线性，Nernst 信号为钟形，并探讨了奇异金属描述的可能性。

Holographic Competition of Phases and Superconductivity

We use a holographic theory to model and study the competition of four phases: an antiferromagnetic phase, a superconducting phase, a metallic phase and a striped phase, using as control parameters temperature and a doping-like parameter. We analyse the various instabilities and determine the possible phases. One class of phase diagrams, that we analyse in detail, is similar to that of high-temperature superconductors as well as other strange metal materials.

Doping the holographic Mott insulator

Mott insulators form because of strong electron repulsions, being at the heart of strongly correlated electron physics. Conventionally these are understood as classical "traffic jams" of electrons described by a short-ranged entangled product ground state. Exploiting the holographic duality, which maps the physics of densely entangled matter onto gravitational black hole physics, we show how Mott-insulators can be constructed departing from entangled non-Fermi liquid metallic states, such as the strange metals found in cuprate superconductors. These "entangled Mott insulators" have traits in c…