Lieb-Robinson causality and non-Fermi liquids
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 of local lattice operators as a function of complex frequency and momentum , 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 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