Interaction-driven localization in holography

By Aristomenis Donos, S. Hartnoll. Nature Physics, 2013

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interaction-driven charge localization across a quantum phase transition involves a fundamental rearrangement of the low-energy degrees of freedom. This fact challenges weakly interacting quasiparticle descriptions of the physics. The canonical example of such localization is the Mott transition. Here, we present a localization mechanism distinct from ‘Mottness’, which employs strong interactions in an essential way. Our mechanism allows anisotropic localization: phases can arise that are insulating in some directions and metallic in others. The central observation is that localization occurs if an operator that breaks translation invariance, a ‘generalized Umklapp’ operator, becomes relevant in the effective low-energy theory. This does not occur at weak coupling. We realize such localization in a strongly interacting theory described by means of the holographic correspondence. Our model captures key features of metal–insulator transitions including major spectral weight transfer and bad (incoherent) metallic behaviour in the vicinity of the transition. The localized phase has a power law gap in the optical conductivity. Strongly interacting condensed-matter systems are often computationally intractable. By introducing a periodic lattice to a holographic model developed by string theorists, it becomes possible to study anisotropic materials that are insulating in certain directions but conducting in others.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/324e04e94968572462f44cd3d445f3b3db1daa6a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Holographic metals and insulators with helical symmetry (2014, background): “6 The purpose of the present work is to investigate the helical ground states in a system that is general enough to allow for a diverse landscape of IR behaviors that would extend those of [19].”
Momentum dissipation and effective theories of coherent and incoherent transport (2014, background): “In systems of this type, the AC and DC conductivities show departures from the Drude-like form, including transitions from conducting to insulating behaviour [7, 12–14, 20, 21, 25, 26, 28–30].”
A simple holographic model of momentum relaxation (2013, background): “This is similar in spirit to constructions in 5 bulk dimensions where Bianchi VII0 symmetry can be exploited to construct helical black holes through the solution of ODEs rather than PDEs [17].”
Dissecting holographic conductivities (2015, background): “Another question is the sensitivity of our results to the choice of momentum relaxation mechanism: would they be modified if we had instead used random-field disorder [3, 4, 22, 37–39], or homogeneous [19, 40, 41] or inhomogeneous lattices [20, 32, 42] to break translational invariance? Furthermore,”
Charge transport in holography with momentum dissipation (2014, background): “If the resistivity diverges at low temperatures, we find soft-gapped insulators, which have a translation-invariant metric and no anisotropy contrarily to those of [28, 29].”
The thermoelectric properties of inhomogeneous holographic lattices (2014, background): “J H E P 0 1 ( 2 0 1 5 ) 0 3 5 whether stronger lattice deformations than we have constructed and/or different types of lattice deformations will lead to a transition to new IR behaviour, as in the metal-insulator transitions of [7, 10, 12] or the metal-metal transitions of [12].”
Thermoelectric DC conductivities from black hole horizons (2014, background): “(2)For the special case of D= 5, helical lattices can also be constructed by solving ODEs [15], extending [16, 17].”
Holographic Q-lattices (2013, methodology): “Note that a different, non-standard, definition of ∆(k) is used in [4, 12,20] for this expression.”
Holographic Quantum Matter (2016, methodology): “32 Spectral weight transfer: Optical conductivity in the metallic (left) and insulating (right) phases of the model from [226].”
Novel metals and insulators from holography (2014, background): “The potential utility of using holographic lattices for studying transitions from metallic to insulating behaviour, and also using them to find new insulating ground states, was discussed in [21].”