English

Non-Fermi glasses: fractionalizing electrons at finite energy density

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2017-10-11 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Non-Fermi liquids are metals that cannot be adiabatically deformed into free fermion states. We argue for the existence of "non-Fermi glasses," which are phases of interacting disordered fermions that are fully many-body localized, yet cannot be deformed into an Anderson insulator without an eigenstate phase transition. We explore the properties of such non-Fermi glasses, focusing on a specific solvable example. At high temperature, non-Fermi glasses have qualitatively similar spectral features to Anderson insulators. We identify a diagnostic, based on ratios of correlation functions, that sharply distinguishes between the two phases even at infinite temperature. We argue that our results and diagnostic should generically apply to the high-temperature behavior of the many-body localized descendants of fractionalized phases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.00981,
  title  = {Non-Fermi glasses: fractionalizing electrons at finite energy density},
  author = {S. A. Parameswaran and Sarang Gopalakrishnan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.00981},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

4 pages, 2 figures, plus supplemental material