Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Incipient charge order destroys quasi-particles

A nice PRL just appeared by Lara Cano-Cortes, Jaime Merino, and Simone Fratini, Quantum critical behaviour of electrons at the edge of charge order. They consider an extended Hubbard model at one-quarter filling. As the intersite Coulomb repulsion V increases there is a quantum phase transition from a metallic Fermi liquid phase to a charge ordered phase. The striking finding is that the coherence temperature, below which quasi-particles exist, approaches zero as the transition is approached.
I also found the paper interesting because this model is directly relevant to a class of organic charge transfer salts, as discussed in a PRB by myself, Jaime, Brad Marston, and Oleg Sushkov.

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