Electrons flow like falling cats: Deformations and emergent gravity in quantum transport

Abstract

The effective low-energy excitations in a metallic or semimetallic crystalline system (i.e. electronic quasiparticles) always have a finite spatial extent. It is self-evident but virtually unexplored how the associated internal degrees of freedom manifest themselves in the quasiparticle response. Here, we investigate this question by illuminating an intimate connection between the theory of nonlinear response and the equations of motion of classical deformable bodies. This connection establishes that nth-order response in an external perturbation corresponds to nth-order derivatives of the quasiparticle motion, where the resulting motion is anomalous at every order due to the internal degrees of freedom. This new point of view predicts that quasiparticles necessarily move in an emergent curved spacetime, even in a homogeneous and defectless lattice. We underscore these concepts using recent results on the second order electrical conductivity, elucidating the associated anomalous acceleration that the quasiparticle exhibits. Based on our observations, we predict the existence of an infinite series of anomalous components of the quasiparticle motion, and propose a new mapping between response theory in flat space and a gravitational theory for the center-of-mass coordinate.