A unified quasiparticle approach to the theory of strongly correlated electron liquids

Abstract

Landau’s quasiparticle formalism is generalized to describe a wide class of strongly correlated Fermi systems, in addition to conventional Fermi liquids. This class includes (i) so-called marginal exemplars and (ii) systems that harbor interaction-driven flat bands, in both of which manifestations of non-Fermi-liquid behavior are well documented. Specifically, the advent of such flat bands is attributed to a spontaneous topological rearrangement of the Landau state that supplements the conventional Landau quasiparticle picture with a different set of quasiparticles, the so-called fermion condensate, whose single-particle spectrum is dispersionless. The celebrated Landau–Luttinger theorem is extended to marginal Fermi liquids, in which the density of the augmented quasiparticle system is shown to coincide with the particle density. On the other hand, the total density of a system hosting an interaction-driven flat band turns out to be the sum of the densities of the two quasiparticle subsystems: the Landau-like component and the fermion condensate. We demonstrate that within the framework of the scenario proposed, a long-standing problem faced by theories of D-wave superconductivity in cuprates, namely a consistent explanation of the so-called Uemera plot, can be naturally resolved.