English

Holographic superconductivity of a critical Fermi surface

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2026-03-24 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We derive a holographic formulation of triplet superconductivity in a two-dimensional metal at a ferromagnetic quantum critical point. Starting from a large-NN Yukawa-Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model of compressible fermions coupled to quantum-critical Ising ferromagnetic fluctuations, we reformulate the pairing problem in terms of bilocal collective fields and analyze Gaussian fluctuations around the quantum-critical normal state. We demonstrate that the resulting pairing action can be mapped onto a scalar field theory in an emergent curved spacetime with AdS2R2_2 \otimes \mathbb{R}_2 geometry. The additional holographic dimension is shown to encode the internal dynamics of Cooper pairs and is related nonlocally to the frequency dependence of the anomalous Gor'kov function via a Radon transform. Within this framework, the onset of superconductivity corresponds to a Breitenlohner-Freedman instability of the scalar field, which is shown to be equivalent to the pairing instability obtained from the linearized Eliashberg equations. The factorized AdS2R2_2 \otimes \mathbb{R}_2 geometry reflects the local-in-space but critical-in-time character of fermionic excitations near a metallic quantum critical point and corresponds to what one expects in the vicinity of a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole. Our results provide a microscopic derivation of holographic superconductivity in a compressible quantum critical metal and clarify the geometric structure underlying quantum-critical pairing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.00474,
  title  = {Holographic superconductivity of a critical Fermi surface},
  author = {Veronika C. Stangier and Jörg Schmalian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.00474},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 4 figures, New co-author added. Substantial revision with corrected analysis