Quantum Cafe: Peter Abbamonte

Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.

Title: Density fluctuations in strange metals

Abstract: Metals exhibit plasmon excitations, which are collective modes one can think of as sound waves in the electron density (as opposed to the atomic density). The so-called “strange metals” are bizarre phases of matter that fail to exhibit well-defined quasiparticles but somehow are still good conductors, leading one to wonder what degree of freedom is actually carrying the charge. A sensible question to ask is, Do strange metals exhibit plasmons? In this talk I will describe momentum-resolved EELS (M-EELS) measurements of several strange metals, notably Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_8+x and Sr₂RuO₄, which are also unconventional superconductors. I will show that plasmon excitations are barely defined in these materials, which instead exhibit an incoherent continuum of charge fluctuations with no particular length or time scale. These fluctuations obey a simple, power law form, suggesting some kind of scale-invariant phase is present, though the data are not consistent with a (textbook) quantum critical point. I will argue that a new kind of theory of matter may be needed to account for this phenomenon.