Strange metals arise in a variety of platforms for strongly correlated electrons, ranging from the cuprates, heavy fermions to flat band systems. Motivated by recent experiments in kagome metals, we study a Hubbard model on a kagome lattice whose noninteracting limit contains flat bands. A Kondo lattice description is constructed, in which the correlation effects are captured by symmetry preserving and exponentially localized molecular orbitals. These compact molecular orbitals represent the local degrees of freedom that emerge from topological flat bands. We identify a quantum critical point at which quasiparticles are lost and strange metallicity emerges. Our theoretical work opens up a new route for realizing beyond-Landau quantum criticality, as well as the associated strange metallicity and emergent quantum phases.
@article{arxiv.2307.09431,
title = {Metallic quantum criticality enabled by flat bands in a kagome lattice},
author = {Lei Chen and Fang Xie and Shouvik Sur and Haoyu Hu and Silke Paschen and Jennifer Cano and Qimiao Si},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09431},
year = {2025}
}