Deviation from Fermi-liquid $T^2$ resistivity caused by collective transport

Abstract

`Fermi-liquid behavior' is nowadays used as a shorthand for quadratic temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity. In a metal, for this to occur, electrons must be cooled well below the Fermi degeneracy temperature, $T_{\mathrm{F}}$. A departure from this behavior is observed at finite temperature. Here, we note that this departure has opposite signs in two distinct types of Fermi liquids. In weakly correlated ones, the upward departure implies a higher exponent of the inelastic resistivity, attributable to \textit{additional scattering} by phonons. In contrast, there is a downward deviation in strongly correlated metals, which implies either \textit{reduced scattering} or \textit{additional conduction}, as in the case of normal liquid $^3$He, in which a distinct contribution to heat transport by a sound mode has been recently identified. Such a channel of conduction smoothly transforms across $T_{\mathrm{F}}$ to the one captured by the Bridgman formula for thermal conductivity of classical liquids. In three metals (UPt$_3$, Sr$_2$RuO$_4$, and heavily overdoped LSCO), according to the available experimental data, the normalized amplitude of excess conductivity at $T/T_{\mathrm{F}}\simeq0.02$ is comparable to what has been seen in $^3$He, suggesting, without establishing, a common origin.