Vanishing Hall conductance in the phase-glass Bose metal at zero temperature

Abstract

Motivated in part by the numerical simulations [ky,kosterlitz1,kosterlitz2] which reveal that the energy to create a defect in a gauge or phase glass scales as $L^{\theta}$ with $\theta<0$ for 2D, thereby implying a vanishing stiffness, we re-examine the relevance of these kinds of models to the Bose metal in light of the new experiments [kapsym,armitage] which reveal that the Hall conductance is zero in the metallic state that disrupts the transition from the superconductor to the insulator in 2D samples. Because of the particle-hole symmetry in the phase glass model, we find that bosonic excitations in a phase glass background generate no Hall conductance at the Gaussian level. Furthermore, this result persists to any order in perturbation theory in the interactions. We show that when particle-hole symmetry is broken, the Hall conductance turns on with the same power law as does the longitudinal conductance. This prediction can be verified experimentally by applying a ground plane to the 2D samples.