Fermi surfaces and gauge-gravity duality

Abstract

We give a unified overview of the zero temperature phases of compressible quantum matter: i.e., phases in which the expectation value of a globally conserved U(1) density, $\mathcal{Q}$, varies smoothly as a function of parameters. Provided the global U(1) and translational symmetries are unbroken, such phases are expected to have Fermi surfaces, and the Luttinger theorem relates the volumes enclosed by these Fermi surfaces to $⟨\mathcal{Q}⟩$. We survey models of interacting bosons and/or fermions and/or gauge fields which realize such phases. Some phases have Fermi surfaces with the singularities of Landau's Fermi liquid theory, while other Fermi surfaces have non-Fermi liquid singularities. Compressible phases found in models applicable to condensed-matter systems are argued to also be present in models obtained by applying chemical potentials (and other deformations allowed by the residual symmetry at nonzero chemical potential) to the paradigmatic supersymmetric gauge theories underlying gauge-gravity duality: the Aharony-Bergman-Jafferis-Maldacena model in spatial dimension $d=2$, and the $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory in $d=3$.