Holographic fermions in external magnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of strongly interacting 2+1D electron systems under magnetic fields using holography, revealing Fermi surface vanishing, phase transitions, and quantum Hall effects, including fractional plateaus.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic model to study magnetic field effects on Fermi surfaces, uncovering phase transitions and quantum Hall phenomena in strongly correlated systems.

Findings

Fermi surface vanishes at strong magnetic fields

Observation of integer and fractional quantum Hall effects

Identification of a metal-strange metal phase transition

Abstract

We study the Fermi level structure of 2+1-dimensional strongly interacting electron systems in external magnetic field using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The gravity dual of a finite density fermion system is a Dirac field in the background of the dyonic AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. In the probe limit the magnetic system can be reduced to the non-magnetic one, with Landau-quantized momenta and rescaled thermodynamical variables. We find that at strong enough magnetic fields, the Fermi surface vanishes and the quasiparticle is lost either through a crossover to conformal regime or through a phase transition to an unstable Fermi surface. In the latter case, the vanishing Fermi velocity at the critical magnetic field triggers the non-Fermi liquid regime with unstable quasiparticles and a change in transport properties of the system. We associate it with a metal-"strange metal" phase transition. Next we compute the DC Hall and longitudinal conductivities using the gravity-dressed fermion propagators. For dual fermions with a large charge, many different Fermi surfaces contribute and the Hall conductivity is quantized as expected for integer Quantum Hall Effect (QHE). At strong magnetic fields, as additional Fermi surfaces open up, new plateaus typical for the fractional QHE appear. The somewhat irregular pattern in the length of fractional QHE plateaus resemble the outcomes of experiments on thin graphite in a strong magnetic field. Finally, motivated by the absence of the sign problem in holography, we suggest a lattice approach to the AdS calculations of finite density systems.