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1. Deformation of the Fermi surface of a spinless two-dimensional electron gas in presence of an anisotropic Coulomb interaction potential

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82564-y  

   Ciftja, Orion ( February 2021 , Scientific Reports)

   We consider the stability of the circular Fermi surface of a two-dimensional electron gas system against an elliptical deformation induced by an anisotropic Coulomb interaction potential. We use the jellium approximation for the neutralizing background and treat the electrons as fully spin-polarized (spinless) particles with a constant isotropic (effective) mass. The anisotropic Coulomb interaction potential considered in this work is inspired from studies of two-dimensional electron gas systems in the quantum Hall regime. We use a Hartree–Fock procedure to obtain analytical results for two special Fermi liquid quantum electronic phases. The first one corresponds to a system with circular Fermi surface while the second one corresponds to a liquid anisotropic phase with a specific elliptical deformation of the Fermi surface that gives rise to the lowest possible potential energy of the system. The results obtained suggest that, for the most general situations, neither of these two Fermi liquid phases represent the lowest energy state of the system within the framework of the family of states considered in this work. The lowest energy phase is one with an optimal elliptical deformation whose specific value is determined by a complex interplay of many factors including the density of the system.

    

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2. Stranger than metals

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abh4273  

   Phillips, Philip W. ; Hussey, Nigel E. ; Abbamonte, Peter ( July 2022 , Science)

   BACKGROUND Landau’s Fermi liquid theory provides the bedrock on which our understanding of metals has developed over the past 65 years. Its basic premise is that the electrons transporting a current can be treated as “quasiparticles”—electron-like particles whose effective mass has been modified, typically through interactions with the atomic lattice and/or other electrons. For a long time, it seemed as though Landau’s theory could account for all the many-body interactions that exist inside a metal, even in the so-called heavy fermion systems whose quasiparticle mass can be up to three orders of magnitude heavier than the electron’s mass. Fermi liquid theory also lay the foundation for the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity. In the past few decades, a number of new metallic systems have been discovered that violate this paradigm. The violation is most evident in the way that the electrical resistivity changes with temperature or magnetic field. In normal metals in which electrons are the charge carriers, the resistivity increases with increasing temperature but saturates, both at low temperatures (because the quantized lattice vibrations are frozen out) and at high temperatures (because the electron mean free path dips below the smallest scattering pathway defined by the lattice spacing). In “strange metals,” by contrast, no saturation occurs, implying that the quasiparticle description breaks down and electrons are no longer the primary charge carriers. When the particle picture breaks down, no local entity carries the current. ADVANCES A new classification of metallicity is not a purely academic exercise, however, as strange metals tend to be the high-temperature phase of some of the best superconductors available. Understanding high-temperature superconductivity stands as a grand challenge because its resolution is fundamentally rooted in the physics of strong interactions, a regime where electrons no longer move independently. Precisely what new emergent phenomena one obtains from the interactions that drive the electron dynamics above the temperature where they superconduct is one of the most urgent problems in physics, attracting the attention of condensed matter physicists as well as string theorists. One thing is clear in this regime: The particle picture breaks down. As particles and locality are typically related, the strange metal raises the distinct possibility that its resolution must abandon the basic building blocks of quantum theory. We review the experimental and theoretical studies that have shaped our current understanding of the emergent strongly interacting physics realized in a host of strange metals, with a special focus on their poster-child: the copper oxide high-temperature superconductors. Experiments are highlighted that attempt to link the phenomenon of nonsaturating resistivity to parameter-free universal physics. A key experimental observation in such materials is that removing a single electron affects the spectrum at all energy scales, not just the low-energy sector as in a Fermi liquid. It is observations of this sort that reinforce the breakdown of the single-particle concept. On the theoretical side, the modern accounts that borrow from the conjecture that strongly interacting physics is really about gravity are discussed extensively, as they have been the most successful thus far in describing the range of physics displayed by strange metals. The foray into gravity models is not just a pipe dream because in such constructions, no particle interpretation is given to the charge density. As the breakdown of the independent-particle picture is central to the strange metal, the gravity constructions are a natural tool to make progress on this problem. Possible experimental tests of this conjecture are also outlined. OUTLOOK As more strange metals emerge and their physical properties come under the scrutiny of the vast array of experimental probes now at our disposal, their mysteries will be revealed and their commonalities and differences cataloged. In so doing, we should be able to understand the universality of strange metal physics. At the same time, the anomalous nature of their superconducting state will become apparent, offering us hope that a new paradigm of pairing of non-quasiparticles will also be formalized. The correlation between the strength of the linear-in-temperature resistivity in cuprate strange metals and their corresponding superfluid density, as revealed here, certainly hints at a fundamental link between the nature of strange metallicity and superconductivity in the cuprates. And as the gravity-inspired theories mature and overcome the challenge of projecting their powerful mathematical machinery onto the appropriate crystallographic lattice, so too will we hope to build with confidence a complete theory of strange metals as they emerge from the horizon of a black hole. Curved spacetime with a black hole in its interior and the strange metal arising on the boundary. This picture is based on the string theory gauge-gravity duality conjecture by J. Maldacena, which states that some strongly interacting quantum mechanical systems can be studied by replacing them with classical gravity in a spacetime in one higher dimension. The conjecture was made possible by thinking about some of the fundamental components of string theory, namely D-branes (the horseshoe-shaped object terminating on a flat surface in the interior of the spacetime). A key surprise of this conjecture is that aspects of condensed matter systems in which the electrons interact strongly—such as strange metals—can be studied using gravity. 

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3. Effects of incipient pairing on nonequilibrium quasiparticle transport in Fermi liquids

   https://doi.org/10.1093/ptep/ptac027  

   Lin, Wei-Ting ; Sauls, J. A. ( February 2022 , Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics)

   The low-temperature properties of a wide range of many-fermion systems spanning metals, quantum gases and liquids to nuclear matter are well understood within the framework of Landau’s theory of Fermi liquids. The low-energy physics of these systems is governed by interacting fermionic quasiparticles with momenta and energies near a Fermi surface in momentum space. Nonequilibrium properties are described by a kinetic equation for the distribution function for quasiparticles proposed by Landau. Quasiparticle interactions with other quasiparticles, phonons, or impurities lead to internal forces acting on a distribution of nonequilibrium quasiparticles, as well as collision processes that ultimately limit the transport of mass, heat, charge, and magnetization, as well as limiting the coherence times of quasiparticles. For Fermi liquids that are close to a second-order phase transition, e.g., Fermi liquids that undergo a superfluid transition, incipient Cooper pairs—long-lived fluctuations of the ordered phase—provide a new channel for scattering quasiparticles, as well as corrections to internal forces acting on the distribution of nonequilibrium quasiparticles. We develop the theory of quasiparticle transport for Fermi liquids in the vicinity of a BCS-type superfluid transition starting from Keldysh’s field theory for nonequilibrium, strongly interacting fermions. The leading corrections to Fermi-liquid theory for nonequilibrium quasiparticle transport near a Cooper instability arise from the virtual emission and absorption of incipient Cooper pairs. Our theory is applicable to quasiparticle transport in superconductors, nuclear matter, and the low-temperature phases of liquid 3He. As an implementation of the theory we calculate the pairing-fluctuation corrections to the attenuation of zero sound in liquid 3He near the superfluid transition and demonstrate quantitative agreement with experimental results.

    

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4. Observation of spontaneous ferromagnetism in a two-dimensional electron system

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018248117  

   Hossain, M. S. ; Ma, M. K. ; Rosales, K. A. ; Chung, Y. J. ; Pfeiffer, L. N. ; West, K. W. ; Baldwin, K. W. ; Shayegan, M. ( December 2020 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   null (Ed.)

   What are the ground states of an interacting, low-density electron system? In the absence of disorder, it has long been expected that as the electron density is lowered, the exchange energy gained by aligning the electron spins should exceed the enhancement in the kinetic (Fermi) energy, leading to a (Bloch) ferromagnetic transition. At even lower densities, another transition to a (Wigner) solid, an ordered array of electrons, should occur. Experimental access to these regimes, however, has been limited because of the absence of a material platform that supports an electron system with very high quality (low disorder) and low density simultaneously. Here we explore the ground states of interacting electrons in an exceptionally clean, two-dimensional electron system confined to a modulation-doped AlAs quantum well. The large electron effective mass in this system allows us to reach very large values of the interaction parameter r s , defined as the ratio of the Coulomb to Fermi energies. As we lower the electron density via gate bias, we find a sequence of phases, qualitatively consistent with the above scenario: a paramagnetic phase at large densities, a spontaneous transition to a ferromagnetic state when r s surpasses 35, and then a phase with strongly nonlinear current-voltage characteristics, suggestive of a pinned Wigner solid, when r s exceeds ≃ 38 . However, our sample makes a transition to an insulating state at r s ≃ 27 , preceding the onset of the spontaneous ferromagnetism, implying that besides interaction, the role of disorder must also be taken into account in understanding the different phases of a realistic dilute electron system. 

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5. Semiclassics: The hidden theory behind the success of DFT

   Okun, Pavel ; Burke, Kieron ( May 2021 , ArXivorg)

   We argue that the success of DFT can be understood in terms of a semiclassical expansion around a very specific limit. This limit was identified long ago by Lieb and Simon for the total electronic energy of a system. This is a universal limit of all electronic structure: atoms, molecules, and solids. For the total energy, Thomas-Fermi theory becomes relatively exact in the limit. The limit can also be studied for much simpler model systems, including non-interacting fermions in a one-dimensional well, where the WKB approximation applies for individual eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. Summation techniques lead to energies and densities that are functionals of the potential. We consider several examples in one dimension (fermions in a box, in a harmonic well, in a linear half-well, and in the Pöschl-Teller well. The effects of higher dimension are also illustrated with the three-dimensional harmonic well and the Bohr atom, non-interacting fermions in a Coulomb well. Modern density functional calculations use the Kohn-Sham scheme almost exclusively. The same semiclassical limit can be studied for the Kohn-Sham kinetic energy, for the exchange energy, and for the correlation energy. For all three, the local density approximation appears to become relatively exact in this limit. Recent work, both analytic and numerical, explores how this limit is approached, in an effort to deduce the leading corrections to the local approximation. A simple scheme, using the Euler-Maclaurin summation formula, is the result of many different attempts at this problem. In very simple cases, the correction formulas are much more accurate than standard density functionals. Several functionals are already in widespread use in both chemistry and materials that incorporate these limits, and prospects for the future are discussed. 

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