A phenomenological description on an incoherent Fermi liquid near optimal doping in high T_{c} cuprates

TL;DR

This paper proposes a confinement-based slave-particle model with the Polyakov-loop parameter to explain marginal Fermi-liquid behavior in high T_{c} cuprates near optimal doping, emphasizing incoherent electrons and crossover phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a confinement scenario using the Polyakov-loop parameter in an SU(2) gauge theory to explain anomalous transport without symmetry breaking.

Findings

The model reproduces the linear temperature dependence of resistivity near optimal doping.

Incoherent electrons arise from confinement of spinons and holons due to large imaginary self-energy parts.

The crossover from incoherent to Fermi-liquid state is explained without a second-order phase transition.

Abstract

Marginal Fermi-liquid physics near optimal doping in high T_{c} cuprates has been explained within two competing scenarios such as the spin-fluctuation theory based on an itinerant picture and the slave-particle approach based on a localized picture. In this study we propose an alternative scenario for the anomalous transport within the context of the slave-particle approach. Although the marginal Fermi-liquid phenomenology was interpreted previously within deconfinement of the compact gauge theory, referred to as the strange metal phase, we start from confinement, introducing the Polyakov-loop parameter into an SU(2) gauge theory formulation of the t-J model. The Polyakov-loop parameter gives rise to incoherent electrons through the confinement of spinons and holons, which result from huge imaginary parts of self-energy corrections for spinons and holons. This confinement scenario serves a novel mechanism for the marginal Fermi-liquid transport in the respect that the scattering source has nothing to do with symmetry breaking. Furthermore, the incoherent Fermi-liquid state evolves into the Fermi liquid phase through crossover instead of an artificial second-order transition as temperature is lowered, where the crossover phenomenon does not result from the Anderson-Higgs mechanism but originate from an energy scale in the holon sector. We fit an experimental data for the electrical resistivity around the optimal doping and find a reasonable match between our theory and the experiment.