Nematic Fermi Fluids in Condensed Matter Physics

By E. Fradkin, Steven A. Kivelson, M. Lawler, J. Eisenstein, A. Mackenzie. 2009

582 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Correlated electron fluids can exhibit a startling array of complex phases, among which one of the more surprising is the electron nematic, a translationally invariant metallic phase with a spontaneously generated spatial anisotropy. Classicalnematicsgenerally occur in liquids of rod-like molecules; given that electrons are point like, the initial theoretical motivation for contemplating electron nematics came from thinking of the electron fluid as a quantum melted electron crystal, rather than a strongly interacting descendent of a Fermi gas. Dramatic transport experiments in ultra-clean quantum Hall systems in 1999 and in Sr3Ru2O7 in a strong magnetic field in 2007 established that such phases exist in nature. In this article, we briefly review the theoretical considerations governing nematic order, summarize the quantum Hall and Sr3Ru2O7 experiments that unambiguously establish the existence of this phase, and survey some of the current evidence for such a phase in the cuprate and Fe-based high temperature superconductors.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41f6c2e858e3cbec60b581c9d9ad10657cb9fa09

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Magnetism and its microscopic origin in iron-based high-temperature superconductors (2012, background): “However, both in the undoped case and particularly in the lightly-doped regime, the asymmetry persists well above the Néel temperature, TN , into a new temperature scale T ∗ that may be associated with the onset of nematic order [45, 46], similarly as in some ruthenates and copper oxides [112].”
In-plane electronic anisotropy of underdoped ‘122’ Fe-arsenide superconductors revealed by measurements of detwinned single crystals (2011, background): “We return to the significance of these observations in relation to the resistivity anisotropy in section 6.”
Symmetry-breaking orbital anisotropy observed for detwinned Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 above the spin density wave transition (2010, background): “Among these, a nematic phase is one where rotational symmetry is spontaneously broken without breaking translational symmetry (1, 2).”
Field-induced polarization of Dirac valleys in bismuth (2011, background): “A nematic liquid of electrons is formed when a metal spontaneously loses its rotational symmetry while keeping its translational invarianc”
Quantum frustration in organic Mott insulators: from spin liquids to unconventional superconductors (2010, background): “…are several other effects that could give rise to large Nernst effects including an electronic nematic or Pomeranchuk phase (Daou et al., 2010; Fradkin et al., 2010; Hackl and Vojta, 2009), stripes (Hackl et al., 2010), a d-density wave (Kotetes and Varelogiannis, 2010) or even just the…”
Functional renormalization group approach to correlated fermion systems (2011, background): “This tendency to form a nematic state (Fradkin et al., 2010) via a d-wave Pomeranchuk instability driven by forward scattering interactions was discovered using functional RG (Halboth and Metzner, 2000b).”