English

Lieb-Robinson causality and non-Fermi liquids

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-10-23 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

Quantum mechanical lattice models with local, bounded interactions obey Lieb-Robinson causality. We show that this implies a domain of analyticity of the retarded Green's function GR(ω,k)G^R(\omega,{\bf k}) of local lattice operators as a function of complex frequency ω\omega and momentum k{\bf k}, similar to the lightcone analyticity property of relativistic field theories. Low-energy effective descriptions of the dynamics must be consistent with this microscopic analyticity constraint. We consider two canonical low-energy fermionic Green's functions describing non-Fermi liquids, the marginal Fermi liquid and the `Hertz liquid'. The pole in these Green's functions must be outside of the Lieb-Robinson domain of analyticity for all complex momenta captured by the low-energy theory. We show that this constraint upper bounds the magnitude of the dimensionless non-Fermi liquid coupling in certain Hertz liquids. We furthermore obtain, from causality, an upper bound on the magnitude GR(ω,k)|G^R(\omega,{\bf k})| within the analytic domain. We use this bound to constrain the quasiparticle residue of the non-Fermi liquids.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.18950,
  title  = {Lieb-Robinson causality and non-Fermi liquids},
  author = {Subham Dutta Chowdhury and Sean A. Hartnoll and Aditya Hebbar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18950},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:58:30.537Z