Locally critical quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated metals

By Qimiao Si, S. Rabello, K. Ingersent, L. Smith. Nature, 2000

802 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When a metal undergoes a continuous quantum phase transition, non-Fermi-liquid behaviour arises near the critical point. All the low-energy degrees of freedom induced by quantum criticality are usually assumed to be spatially extended, corresponding to long-wavelength fluctuations of the order parameter. But this picture has been contradicted by the results of recent experiments on a prototype system: heavy fermion metals at a zero-temperature magnetic transition. In particular, neutron scattering from CeCu6-x Aux has revealed anomalous dynamics at atomic length scales, leading to much debate as to the fate of the local moments in the quantum-critical regime. Here we report our theoretical finding of a locally critical quantum phase transition in a model of heavy fermions. The dynamics at the critical point are in agreement with experiment. We propose local criticality to be a phenomenon of general relevance to strongly correlated metals.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad0853a2544c77528be5f9756f931bfd188f33ce

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Citations in the corpus

Fermi-liquid instabilities at magnetic quantum phase transitions (2006, methodology): “The competition is captured by the RG equations (Sengupta, 2000; Si et al., 2001) β(γ) = 3 − d 2 γ − γ3 , β(j) = j2 − jγ2 .”
Flat bands, strange metals and the Kondo effect (2023, positive): “Theories based on distinct starting points — from Kondo destruction models 91–93 to Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev-motivated models 94–96 and ersatz Fermi liquids 97 — have been proposed to explain or be compatible with this behaviour.”
Dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems (2015, background): “It also appears in the context of glass dynamics (Rosenberg et al., 2003) or quantum impurity systems (Si et al., 2001).”
Electronic structure calculations with dynamical mean-field theory (2005, methodology): “…has been useful in incorporating effects of the long-range Coulomb interactions Chitra and Kotliar, 2000b as well as in the study of heavy-fermion quantum critical points Si et al., 1999, 2001 and quantum spin glasses Bray and Moore, 1980; Sachdev and Ye, 1993; Sengupta and Georges, 1995 .”
Semi-local quantum liquids (2011, background): “The phase described by AdS2×R(2) is also reminiscent of various theoretical models based on a large spatial dimension mean field approximation [18], such as the gapless quantum liquids of [19–21] and the “local quantum critical point” of [22].”
Quantum criticality (2005, background): “proposal is that quantum critical matter involves the growth of droplets of order in time, but not space[15].”
Numerical renormalization group method for quantum impurity systems (2007, background): “The term ‘local criticality’ has been first used in the context of phase transitions in certain heavy fermion systems, such as CeCu6−xAux (Si et al., 2001, 1999; v. Löhneysen et al., 2007).”