Emergent quantum criticality, Fermi surfaces, and AdS2

By T. Faulkner, Hong Liu, John McGreevy, David Vegh. 2009

671 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravity solutions dual to d-dimensional field theories at finite charge density have a near-horizon region, which is AdS{sub 2}xR{sup d-1}. The scale invariance of the AdS{sub 2} region implies that at low energies the dual field theory exhibits emergent quantum critical behavior controlled by a (0+1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFT). This interpretation sheds light on recently-discovered holographic descriptions of Fermi surfaces, allowing an analytic understanding of their low-energy excitations. For example, the scaling behavior near the Fermi surfaces is determined by conformal dimensions in the emergent IR CFT. In particular, when the operator is marginal in the IR CFT, the corresponding spectral function is precisely of the ''marginal Fermi liquid'' form, postulated to describe the optimally doped cuprates.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ca38b09bc1591ad18a15a7d74f0b5209050ed3b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Hartnoll
2. S. Sachdev
3. T. Takayanagi
4. V. Hubeny
5. R. Myers
6. M. Rangamani
7. D. Stanford
8. Blaise Goutéraux

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. S. Hartnoll
2. S. Sachdev
3. D. Stanford
4. T. Takayanagi
5. M. Rangamani
6. Blaise Goutéraux
7. R. Myers
8. T. Nishioka

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Hartnoll
2. S. Sachdev
3. T. Takayanagi
4. V. Hubeny
5. R. Myers
6. M. Rangamani
7. D. Harlow
8. Blaise Goutéraux

Citations in the corpus

• Lectures on holographic non-Fermi liquids and quantum phase transitions (2011, methodology): “Here we calculate the density of states of a neutral scalar field φ in AdS2×Rd−1, whose equation of motion is given by (A6)–(A8) with q∗ = 0.”
• Black hole determinants and quasinormal modes (2009, background): “Examples of situations where this occurs include hydrodynamic poles [33, 34], cyclotron resonances [35, 36], near the onset of bosonic instabilities such as superconductivity [37, 38, 39] and in the vicinity of Fermi surfaces [40, 41, 42, 43].”
• Quantum critical lines in holographic phases with (un)broken symmetry (2012, background): “5)), a novel scaling symmetry emerged in the IR regime, realized by an AdS2 geometry, [37].”
• Generalized holographic quantum criticality at finite density (2011, result): “All of these results can now naturally be linked with those of [60], which showed that Lifshitz symmetry allowed for Fermi Liquid behaviour, and earlier ones of [61], where the near-horizon AdS2×R emergent geometry was proved to generate non Fermi-Liquid behaviour.”
• Integrating out geometry: holographic Wilsonian RG and the membrane paradigm (2010, background): “The IR contribution to the two point correlation function of Ψ+ is proportional to ω2νk (this follows from the AdS2 geometry or equivalently from conformal symmetry in eCFT1).”
• Electron stars for holographic metallic criticality (2010, neutral): “A Fermi surface appears not to be inherent to the gravitational geometry, but depends on the nature of external probes [21, 22, 23, 24, 25].”
• Evolution of holographic entanglement entropy after thermal and electromagnetic quenches (2010, background): “It is tempting to speculate that for our electromagnetic quench, the growth of entropy in the intermediate region might be captured by an effective lower-dimensional theory captured by AdS2 physics, as has been shown to happen for aspects of the physics of studying Fermi surfaces holographically in ”
• Black hole superradiance from Kerr/CFT (2009, background): “An interesting recent discussion can be found in [13].”
• Probe branes, time-dependent couplings and thermalization in AdS/CFT (2010, methodology): “Such probe branes [25] have been used to model flavor physics [26–28] and quantum critical phenomena : this ”top-down” approach [29–33] is complementary to the ”bottom-up” approach involving the physics of charged black holes in AdS [10, 11, 34, 35].”
• Hidden Fermi surfaces in compressible states of gauge-gravity duality (2011, neutral): “The mesinos occupy fermionic states obeying the Dirac equation which can be written in terms of a two-component spinor, χk [6, 25, 36] : ( −iσ √ f(r) g(r) d dr −mLσ √ f(r)− kσr √ f(r)− qAt(r) ) χk(r) = E χk(r) (4.”
• Holographic superconductor/insulator transition at zero temperature (2009, methodology): “Indeed, the AdS RN black hole phase, in the presence of fermions, shows the non-Fermi liquid behavior [28–30] due to the near horizon AdS2 geometry [30, 31].”
• Holography of charged dilaton black holes (2009, background): “• Several recent papers have found interesting evidence of non-Fermi liquid states arising from the physics of probe fermions in the AdS-RN black hole [39, 40, 41, 42, 43].”