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Singular charge fluctuations at a magnetic quantum critical point

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Prochaska, L 
Li, X 
MacFarland, DC 
Andrews, AM 
Bonta, M 

Abstract

jats:pStrange metal behavior is ubiquitous in correlated materials, ranging from cuprate superconductors to bilayer graphene, and may arise from physics beyond the quantum fluctuations of a Landau order parameter. In quantum-critical heavy-fermion antiferromagnets, such physics may be realized as critical Kondo entanglement of spin and charge and probed with optical conductivity. We present terahertz time-domain transmission spectroscopy on molecular beam epitaxy–grown thin films of YbRhjats:sub2</jats:sub>Sijats:sub2</jats:sub>, a model strange-metal compound. We observed frequency over temperature scaling of the optical conductivity as a hallmark of beyond-Landau quantum criticality. Our discovery suggests that critical charge fluctuations play a central role in the strange metal behavior, elucidating one of the long-standing mysteries of correlated quantum matter.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

5108 Quantum Physics, 51 Physical Sciences, 5104 Condensed Matter Physics

Journal Title

Science

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0036-8075
1095-9203

Volume Title

367

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Financial support for this work was provided by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 227378), the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO W911NF-14-1-0496), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF W1243, P29279-N27, and P29296-N27), and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 824109 – EMP). X.L. and J.K. acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF MRSEC DMR-1720595) and the ARO (W911NF-17-1-0259). Q.S. acknowledges financial support from the NSF (DMR-1920740), the Robert A.Welch Foundation (C-1411), and the ARO (W911NF-14-1-0525), and hospitality of the University of California at Berkeley, the Aspen Center for Physics (NSF grant PHY-1607611), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (via a Ulam Scholarship from the Center for Nonlinear Studies). This work has also been supported by an InterDisciplinary Excellence Award (IDEA) from Rice University (Q.S., E.R., J.K., S.P.).