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A long-standing problem in the study of the under-hole-doped cuprates has been the description of the Fermi surfaces underlying the high magnetic field quantum oscillations, and their connection to the higher temperature pseudogap metal. Harrison and Sebastian [Phys. Rev. Lett.106, 226402 (2011)] proposed that the pseudogap “Fermi arcs” are reconstructed into an electron pocket by field-induced charge density wave order. But computations on such a model [Zhang and Mei,Europhys. Lett.114, 47008 (2016)] show an unobserved additional oscillation frequency from a Fermi surface arising from the backsides of the hole pockets completing the Fermi arcs. We describe a transition from a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*) model of the pseudogap metal, to a metal with bidirectional charge density wave order without fractionalization. We show that the confinement of the fermionic spinon excitations of the FL* across this transition can eliminate the unobserved oscillation frequency. 

We consider a SU(2) lattice gauge theory on the square lattice, with a single fundamental complex fermion and a single fundamental complex boson on each lattice site. Projective symmetries of the gauge-charged fermions are chosen so that they match with those of the spinons of the $\pi$-flux spin liquid. Global symmetries of all gauge-invariant observables are chosen to match with those of the particle-hole symmetric electronic Hubbard model at half-filling. Consequently, both the fundamental fermion and fundamental boson move in an average background $\pi$-flux, their gauge-invariant composite is the physical electron, and eliminating gauge fields in a strong gauge-coupling expansion yields an effective extended Hubbard model for the electrons. The SU(2) gauge theory displays several confining/Higgs phases: a nodal $d$-wave superconductor, and states with Néel, valence-bond solid, charge, or staggered current orders. There are also a number of quantum phase transitions between these phases that are very likely described by $(2+1)$-dimensional deconfined conformal gauge theories, and we present large flavor expansions for such theories. These include the phenomenologically attractive case of a transition between a conventional insulator with a charge gap and Néel order, and a conventional $d$-wave superconductor with gapless Bogoliubov quasiparticles at four nodal points in the Brillouin zone. We also apply our approach to the honeycomb lattice, where we find a bicritical point at the junction of Néel, valence bond solid (Kekulé), and Dirac semimetal phases. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

The strange metal phase of correlated electrons materials was described in a recent theory by a model of a Fermi surface coupled a two-dimensional quantum critical bosonic field with a spatially random Yukawa coupling. With the assumption of self-averaging randomness, similar to that in the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model, numerous observed properties of a strange metal were obtained for a wide range of intermediate temperatures, including the linear in temperature resistivity. The Harris criterion implies that spatial fluctuations in the local position of the critical point must dominate at lower temperatures. For an $M$-component boson with $M\ge 2$, we use multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) to compute the real frequency spectrum of the boson propagator in a self-consistent mean-field treatment of the boson self-interactions, but an exact treatment of multiple realizations of the spatial randomness from the random boson mass. We find that Landau damping from the fermions leads to the emergence of the physics of the random transverse-field Ising model at low temperatures, as has been proposed by Hoyos, Kotabage, and Vojta. This regime is controlled by localized overdamped eigenmodes of the bosonic scalar field, also has a resistivity which is nearly linear-in-temperature, and extends into a “quantum critical phase” away from the quantum critical point, as observed in several cuprates. For the $M=1$Ising scalar, the mean-field treatment is not applicable, and so we use Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations running on multiple GPUs; we find a rounded transition and localization physics, with strange metal behavior in an extended region around the transition.