D-wave correlated critical Bose liquids in two dimensions

Abstract

We develop a description of a new quantum liquid phase of interacting bosons in 2d which possesses relative D-wave two-body correlations and which we call a D-wave Bose Liquid (DBL). The DBL has no broken symmetries, supports gapless boson excitations residing on "Bose surfaces" in momentum space, and exhibits power law correlations with continuously variable exponents. While the DBL can be constructed for bosons in the 2d continuum, the state only respects the point group symmetries of the square lattice. On the lattice the DBL respects all symmetries and does not require a particular filling. But lattice effects allow a second distinct phase, a quasi-local variant which we call a D-wave Local Bose Liquid (DLBL). Remarkably, the DLBL has short-range boson correlations and hence no Bose surfaces, despite sharing gapless excitations and other critical signatures with the DBL. Moreover, both phases are metals with a resistance that vanishes as a power of the temperature. We establish these results by constructing a class of many-particle wavefunctions for the DBL, which are time reversal invariant analogs of Laughlin's quantum Hall wavefunction for bosons at $\nu=1/2$. A gauge theory formulation leads to a simple mean field theory, and an N-flavor generalization enables incorporation of gauge field fluctuations to deduce the properties of the DBL/DLBL; various equal time correlation functions are in qualitative accord with the properties inferred from the wavefunctions. We also identify a promising Hamiltonian which might manifest the DBL or DLBL, and perform a variational study comparing to other competing phases. We suggest how the DBL wavefunction can be generalized to describe an itinerant non-Fermi liquid phase of electrons on the square lattice with a no double occupancy constraint, a D-wave metal phase.