Quasilocal strange metal

Abstract

One of the key factors that determine the fates of quantum many-body systems in the zero temperature limit is the competition between kinetic energy that delocalizes particles in space and interaction that promotes localization. While one dominates over the other in conventional metals and insulators, exotic states can arise at quantum critical points where none of them clearly wins. Here we present a class of metallic states that emerge at an antiferromagnetic (AF) quantum critical point in the presence of one-dimensional Fermi surfaces embedded in space dimensions three and below. At the critical point, interactions between particles are screened to zero in the low-energy limit and at the same time the kinetic energy is suppressed in certain spatial directions to the leading order in a perturbative expansion that becomes asymptotically exact in three dimensions. The resulting dispersionless and interactionless state exhibits distinct quasilocal strange metallic behaviors due to a subtle dynamical balance between screening and infrared singularity caused by spontaneous reduction of effective dimensionality. The strange metal, which is stable near three dimensions, shows enhanced fluctuations of bond density waves, $d$-wave pairing, and pair density waves.