English

Singular charge fluctuations at a magnetic quantum critical point

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-02-25 v1

Abstract

Strange metal behavior is ubiquitous to correlated materials ranging from cuprate superconductors to bilayer graphene. There is increasing recognition that it arises from physics beyond the quantum fluctuations of a Landau order parameter which, in quantum critical heavy fermion antiferromagnets, may be realized as critical Kondo entanglement of spin and charge. The dynamics of the associated electronic delocalization transition could be ideally probed by optical conductivity, but experiments in the corresponding frequency and temperature ranges have remained elusive. We present terahertz time-domain transmission spectroscopy on molecular beam epitaxy-grown thin films of YbRh2_2Si2_2, a model strange metal compound. We observe frequency over temperature scaling of the optical conductivity as a hallmark of beyond-Landau quantum criticality. Our discovery implicates critical charge fluctuations as playing a central role in the strange metal behavior, thereby elucidating one of the longstanding mysteries of correlated quantum matter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.02296,
  title  = {Singular charge fluctuations at a magnetic quantum critical point},
  author = {L. Prochaska and X. Li and D. C. MacFarland and A. M. Andrews and M. Bonta and E. F. Bianco and S. Yazdi and W. Schrenk and H. Detz and A. Limbeck and Q. Si and E. Ringe and G. Strasser and J. Kono and S. Paschen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.02296},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

preprint with 15 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:26:38.057Z