Wednesday, April 4, 2018

What do you call a mixture of a bad metal and a good metal?

It is fun to come up with clever names for new physical phenomena: quark, big bang, Janus, slepton,  chromodynamics, inflation, squashon, ...
There is an amusing article by David Mermin about how he managed to get boojum  accepted as a scientific term.
Can you think of others?

What is a good synonym for something that has both good and bad qualities?
A curate's egg?

I was wondering about this because of thinking about a metal that is a mixture of a good metal and a bad metal. This is relevant close to an orbital-selective Mott transition. There it may be possible to have multiple Fermi liquids (associated with multiple bands) at low temperatures with different coherence temperatures. For example, this does occur in strontium ruthenate.  As a result, when the temperature is increased one can enter a state in which one of the bands has coherent quasi-particles (and a well-defined Fermi surface) and another does not, i.e. it is a bad metal.

A relevant paper is
Observation of Temperature-Induced Crossover to an Orbital-Selective Mott Phase in AxFe2-ySe2 (A 1⁄4 K, Rb) Superconductors 
M. Yi, D. H. Lu, R. Yu, S. C. Riggs, J.-H. Chu, B. Lv, Z. K. Liu, M. Lu, Y.-T. Cui, M. Hashimoto, S.-K. Mo, Z. Hussain, C. W. Chu, I. R. Fisher, Q. Si, and Z.-X. Shen

They present ARPES data, including that below, that shows how the spectral intensity changes as the temperature increases. The blue and red curves are identified with different d-orbital bands.



Being cautious, I am a bit wary about how clearly the data do support the conclusions. Nevertheless, ...
The authors also present a slave-spin theory calculation for a five-band Hubbard-Kanamori model that is consistent with the experimental data.

I thank Alejandro Mezio for helpful discussions about this topic.

1 comment:

  1. Regarding the title: I thought "orbital selective bad metal" would be okay - as you already hint toward?

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