arXiv subjects

T. Senthil

Publications and source records attributed to T. Senthil.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2012

Paired chiral spin liquid with a Fermi surface in S=1 model on the triangular lattice

Motivated by recent experiments on Ba3NiSb2O9, we investigate possible quantum spin liquid ground states for spin S=1 Heisenberg models on the triangular lattice. We use Variational Monte Carlo techniques to calculate the energies of microscopic spin liquid wave functions where spin is represented by three flavors of fermionic spinon operators. These energies are compared with the energies of various competing three-sublattice ordered states. Our approach shows that the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with biquadratic term and single-ion anisotropy does not have a low-temperature spin liquid phase. However, for an SU(3)-invariant model with sufficiently strong ring-exchange terms, we find a paired chiral quantum spin liquid with a Fermi surface of deconfined spinons that is stable against all types of ordering patterns we considered. We discuss the physics of this exotic spin liquid state in relation with the recent experiment and suggest new ways to test this scenario.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Overscreened Kondo fixed point in S=1 spin liquid

We propose a possible realization of the overscreened Kondo impurity problem by a magnetic s=1/2 impurity embedded in a two-dimensional S=1 U(1) spin liquid with a Fermi surface. This problem contains an interesting interplay between non-Fermi-liquid behavior induced by a U(1) gauge field coupled to fermions and a non-Fermi-liquid fixed point in the overscreened Kondo problem. Using a large-N expansion together with an expansion in the dynamical exponent of the gauge field, we find that the coupling to the gauge field leads to weak but observable changes in the physical properties of the system at the overscreened Kondo fixed point. We discuss the extrapolation of this result to a physical case and argue that the realization of overscreened Kondo physics could lead to observations of effects due to gauge fields.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Stripe melting and quantum criticality in correlated metals

We study theoretically quantum melting transitions of stripe order in a metallic environment, and the associated reconstruction of the electronic Fermi surface. We show that such quantum phase transitions can be continuous in situations where the stripe melting occurs by proliferating pairs of dislocations in the stripe order parameter without proliferating single dislocations. We develop an intuitive picture of such phases as "Stripe Loop Metals" where the fluctuating stripes form closed loops of arbitrary size at long distances. We obtain a controlled critical theory of a few different continuous quantum melting transitions of stripes in metals . At such a (deconfined) critical point the fluctuations of the stripe order parameter are strongly coupled, yet tractable. They also decouple dynamically from the Fermi-surface. We calculate many universal properties of these quantum critical points. In particular we find that the full Fermi-surface and the associated Landau quasiparticles remain sharply defined at the critical point. We discuss the phenomenon of Fermi surface reconstruction across this transition and the effect of quantum critical stripe fluctuations on the superconducting instability. We study possible relevance of our results to several phenomena in the cuprates.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Integer quantum Hall effect for bosons: A physical realization

A simple physical realization of an integer quantum Hall state of interacting two dimensional bosons is provided. This is an example of a "symmetry-protected topological" (SPT) phase which is a generalization of the concept of topological insulators to systems of interacting bosons or fermions. Universal physical properties of the boson integer quantum Hall state are described and shown to correspond to those expected from general classifications of SPT phases.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Loop current order and d-wave superconductivity: some observable consequences

Loop current order has been reported in the pseudogap regime of a few cuprate systems in polarized neutron scattering experiments. Here we study several observable consequences of such order in the d-wave superconducting state at low T. The symmetries of the loop order removes degeneracy between momenta k and -k. Consequently there is a remnant Bogoliubov Fermi surface in the superconducting state. Bounds on the possible existence of such a Fermi surface may be placed from existing data. Detecting such a Fermi surface will be a very useful confirmation of the existence of loop order in various cuprates. We show through explicit calculations that the Bogoliubov Fermi surface does not display quantum oscillations in a magnetic field consistent with natural expectations. Inclusion of a field induced spin stripe order reconstructs the Bogoliubov Fermi surface to develop pockets which then show quantum oscillations in the superconducting state. Difficulties with interpreting quantum oscillation data in the cuprates along these lines are pointed out.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Quantum spin liquids and the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors

We describe a new possible route to the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors such as Si:P or Si:B. We explore the possibility that the loss of metallic transport occurs through Mott localization of electrons into a quantum spin liquid state with diffusive charge neutral "spinon" excitations. Such a quantum spin liquid state can appear as an intermediate phase between the metal and the Anderson-Mott insulator. An immediate testable consequence is the presence of metallic thermal conductivity at low temperature in the electrical insulator near the metal-insulator transition. Further we show that though the transition is second order the zero temperature residual electrical conductivity will jump as the transition is approached from the metallic side. However the electrical conductivity will have a non-monotonic temperature dependence that may complicate the extrapolation to zero temperature. Signatures in other experiments and some comparisons with existing data are made.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Orthogonal Metals: The simplest non-Fermi liquids

We present a fractionalized metallic phase which is indistinguishable from the Fermi liquid in conductivity and thermodynamics, but is sharply distinct in one electron properties, such as the electron spectral function. We dub this phase the `Orthogonal Metal.' The Orthogonal Metal and the transition to it from the Fermi liquid are naturally described using a slave particle representation wherein the electron is expressed as a product of a fermion and a slave Ising spin. We emphasize that when the slave spins are disordered the result is not a Mott insulator (as erroneously assumed in the prior literature) but rather the Orthogonal Metal. We construct prototypical ground state wavefunctions for the Orthogonal Metal by modifying the Jastrow factor of Slater-Jastrow wavefunctions that describe ordinary Fermi liquids. We further demonstrate that the transition from the Fermi liquid to the Orthogonal Metal can, in some circumstances, provide a simple example of a continuous destruction of a Fermi surface with a critical Fermi surface appearing right at the critical point. We present exactly soluble models that realize an Orthogonal Metal phase, and the phase transition to the Fermi liquid. These models thus provide valuable solvable examples for phase transitions associated with the death of a Fermi surface.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2012

Theory of a continuous stripe melting transition in a two dimensional metal: Possible application to cuprates

We develop a concrete theory of continuous stripe melting quantum phase transitions in two dimensional metals and the associated Fermi surface reconstruction. Such phase transitions are strongly coupled but yet theoretically tractable in situations where the stripe ordering is destroyed by proliferating doubled dislocations of the charge stripe order. The resulting non-Landau quantum critical point (QCP) has strong stripe fluctuations which we show decouple dynamically from the Fermi surface even though static stripe ordering reconstructs the Fermi surface. We discuss connections to various stripe phenomena in the cuprates. We point out several puzzling aspects of old experimental results (Aeppli et al, Science 1997) on singular stripe fluctuations in the cuprates, and provide a possible explanation within our theory. These results may thus have been the first observation of non-Landau quantum criticality in an experiment.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Universal crossovers between entanglement entropy and thermal entropy

We postulate the existence of universal crossover functions connecting the universal parts of the entanglement entropy to the low temperature thermal entropy in gapless quantum many-body systems. These scaling functions encode the intuition that the same low energy degrees of freedom which control low temperature thermal physics are also responsible for the long range entanglement in the quantum ground state. We demonstrate the correctness of the proposed scaling form and determine the scaling function for certain classes of gapless systems whose low energy physics is described by a conformal field theory. We also use our crossover formalism to argue that local systems which are "natural" can violate the boundary law at most logarithmically. In particular, we show that several non-Fermi liquid phases of matter have entanglement entropy that is at most of order $L^{d-1}\log{(L)} $ for a region of linear size $L$ thereby confirming various earlier suggestions in the literature. We also briefly apply our crossover formalism to the study of fluctuations in conserved quantities and discuss some subtleties that occur in systems that spontaneously break a continuous symmetry.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Entanglement Structure of Deconfined Quantum Critical Points

We study the entanglement properties of deconfined quantum critical points. We show not only that these critical points may be distinguished by their entanglement structure but also that they are in general more highly entangled that conventional critical points. We primarily focus on computations of the entanglement entropy of deconfined critical points in 2+1 dimensions, drawing connections to topological entanglement entropy and a recent conjecture on the monotonicity under RG flow of universal terms in the entanglement entropy. We also consider in some detail a variety of issues surrounding the extraction of universal terms in the entanglement entropy. Finally, we compare some of our results to recent numerical simulations.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

A geometric proof of the equality between entanglement and edge spectra

The bulk-edge correspondence for topological quantum liquids states that the spectrum of the reduced density matrix of a large subregion reproduces the thermal spectrum of a physical edge. This correspondence suggests an intricate connection between ground state entanglement and physical edge dynamics. We give a simple geometric proof of the bulk-edge correspondence for a wide variety of physical systems. Our unified proof relies on geometric techniques available in Lorentz invariant and conformally invariant quantum field theories. These methods were originally developed in part to understand the physics of black holes, and we now apply them to determine the local structure of entanglement in quantum many-body systems.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Exotic S=1 spin liquid state with fermionic excitations on triangular lattice

Motivated by recent experiments on the material Ba_3NiSb_2O_9 we consider a spin-one quantum antiferromagnet on a triangular lattice with the Heisenberg bilinear and biquadratic exchange interactions and a single-ion anisotropy. Using a fermionic "triplon" representation for spins, we study the phase diagram within mean field theory. In addition to a fully gapped spin-liquid ground state, we find a state where one gapless triplon mode with Fermi surface coexists with d + id topological pairing of the other triplons. Despite the existence of a Fermi surface, this ground state has fully gapped bulk spin excitations. Such a state has linear in temperature specific heat and constant in plane spin susceptibility, with an unusually high Wilson ratio.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2011

Decohering the Fermi liquid: A dual approach to the Mott Transition

We present a theoretical approach to describing the Mott transition of electrons on a two dimensional lattice that begins with the low energy effective theory of the Fermi liquid. The approach to the Mott transition must be characterized by the suppression of density and current fluctuations which correspond to specific shape deformations of the Fermi surface. We explore the nature of the Mott insulator and the corresponding Mott transition when these shape fluctuations of the Fermi surface are suppressed without making any a prior assumptions about other Fermi surface shape fluctuations. Building on insights from the theory of the Mott transition of bosons, we implement this suppression by identifying and condensing vortex degrees of freedom in the phase of the low energy electron operator. We show that the resulting Mott insulator is a quantum spin liquid with a spinon fermi surface coupled to a U(1) gauge field which is usually described within a slave particle formulation. Our approach thus provides a coarse-grained treatment of the Mott transition and the proximate spin liquid that is nevertheless equivalent to the standard slave particle construction. This alternate point of view provides further insight into the novel physics of the Mott transition and the spin liquid state that is potentially useful. We describe a generalization that suppresses spin anti-symmetric fluctuations of the Fermi surface that leads to a spin-gapped charge metal previously also discussed in terms of slave particle constructions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Weak Mott insulators on the triangular lattice: possibility of a gapless nematic quantum spin liquid

We study the energetics of Gutzwiller projected BCS states of various symmetries for the triangular lattice antiferromagnet with a four particle ring exchange using variational Monte Carlo methods. In a range of parameters the energetically favored state is found to be a projected $d_{x^2-y^2}$ paired state which breaks lattice rotational symmetry. We show that the properties of this nematic or orientationally ordered paired spin liquid state as a function of temperature and pressure can account for many of the experiments on organic materials. We also study the ring-exchange model with ferromagnetic Heisenberg exchange and find that amongst the studied ansätze, a projected $f-$wave state is the most favorable.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

A non-abelian spin-liquid in a spin-1 quantum magnet

We study a time-reversal invariant non-abelian spin-liquid state in an $SU (2)$ symmetric spin $S = 1$ quantum magnet on a triangular lattice. The spin-liquid is obtained by quantum disordering a non-collinear nematic state. We show that such a spin-liquid cannot be obtained by the standard projective construction for spin-liquids. We also study phase transition between the spin-liquid and the non-collinear nematic state and show that it cannot be described within Landau-Ginzburg- Wilson paradigm.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Twisted Hubbard Model for Sr2IrO4: Magnetism and Possible High Temperature Superconductivity

Sr2IrO4 has been suggested as a Mott insulator from a single J_eff=1/2 band, similar to the cuprates. However this picture is complicated by the measured large magnetic anisotropy and ferromagnetism. Based on a careful mapping to the J_eff=1/2 (pseudospin-1/2) space, we propose that the low energy electronic structure of Sr2IrO4 can indeed be described by a SU(2) invariant pseudospin-1/2 Hubbard model very similar to that of the cuprates, but with a "twisted" coupling to external magnetic field (a g-tensor with a staggered antisymmetric component). This perspective naturally explains the magnetic properties of Sr2IrO4. We also derive several simple facts based on this mapping and the known results about the Hubbard model and the cuprates, which may be tested in future experiments on Sr2IrO4. In particular we propose that (electron-)doping Sr2IrO4 can potentially realize high-temperature superconductivity.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Charge Friedel oscillations in a Mott insulator

When a metal undergoes a transition to an insulator it will lose its electronic Fermi surface. Interestingly in some situations a `ghost' Fermi surface of electrically neutral spin carrying fermions may survive into the insulator. Such a novel ghost Fermi surface has been proposed to underlie the properties of a few different materials but its direct detection has proven elusive. In this paper we show that the ghost Fermi surface leads to slowly decaying spatial oscillations of the electron density near impurities or other defects. These and related oscillations stem from the sharpness of the ghost Fermi surface and are direct analogs of the familiar Friedel oscillations in metals. The oscillation period contains geometric information about the shape of the ghost Fermi surface which can be potentially exploited to detect its existence.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Correlated Topological Insulators and the Fractional Magnetoelectric Effect

Topological insulators are characterized by the presence of gapless surface modes protected by time-reversal symmetry. In three space dimensions the magnetoelectric response is described in terms of a bulk theta term for the electromagnetic field. Here we construct theoretical examples of such phases that cannot be smoothly connected to any band insulator. Such correlated topological insulators admit the possibility of fractional magnetoelectric response described by fractional theta/pi. We show that fractional theta/pi is only possible in a gapped time reversal invariant system of bosons or fermions if the system also has deconfined fractional excitations and associated degenerate ground states on topologically non-trivial spaces. We illustrate this result with a concrete example of a time reversal symmetric topological insulator of correlated bosons with theta = pi/4. Extensions to electronic fractional topological insulators are briefly described.

cond-mat.str-el↗