English

Transport in a One-Dimensional Hyperconductor

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2016-04-06 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We define a `hyperconductor' to be a material whose electrical and thermal DC conductivities are infinite at zero temperature and finite at any non-zero temperature. The low-temperature behavior of a hyperconductor is controlled by a quantum critical phase of interacting electrons that is stable to all potentially-gap-generating interactions and potentially-localizing disorder. In this paper, we compute the low-temperature DC and AC electrical and thermal conductivities in a one-dimensional hyperconductor, studied previously by the present authors, in the presence of both disorder and umklapp scattering. We identify the conditions under which the transport coefficients are finite, which allows us to exhibit examples of violations of the Wiedemann-Franz law. The temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity, which is characterized by the parameter ΔX\Delta_X, is a power law, σ1/T12(2ΔX)\sigma \propto 1/T^{1 - 2(2-\Delta_X)} when ΔX2\Delta_X \geq 2, down to zero temperature when the Fermi surface is commensurate with the lattice. There is a surface in parameter space along which ΔX=2\Delta_X = 2 and ΔX2\Delta_X \approx 2 for small deviations from this surface. In the generic (incommensurate) case with weak disorder, such scaling is seen at high-temperatures, followed by an exponential increase of the conductivity lnσ1/T\ln \sigma \sim 1/T at intermediate temperatures and, finally, σ1/T22(2ΔX)\sigma \propto 1/T^{2-2(2-{\Delta_X})} at the lowest temperatures. In both cases, the thermal conductivity diverges at low temperatures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.04280,
  title  = {Transport in a One-Dimensional Hyperconductor},
  author = {Eugeniu Plamadeala and Michael Mulligan and Chetan Nayak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.04280},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v.2 minor updates, 19 pages, 4 appendices

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:56:31.241Z