Shining light on transition metal oxides: unveiling the hidden Fermi Liquid

TL;DR

This paper investigates the temperature-dependent optical properties of strongly correlated metals, revealing that their anomalous transport behaviors are linked to resilient quasiparticles, supported by both experimental and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of optical spectroscopy data combined with first-principles calculations to understand quasiparticle dynamics in correlated metals.

Findings

In V2O3, the effective plasma frequency increases with temperature.

The effective scattering rate shows a stronger temperature dependence than traditional models.

The theoretical results align quantitatively with experimental data.

Abstract

We use low energy optical spectroscopy and first principles LDA+DMFT calculations to test the hypothesis that the anomalous transport properties of strongly correlated metals originate in the strong temperature dependence of their underlying resilient quasiparticles. We express the resistivity in terms of an effective plasma frequency $\omega_p^*$ and an effective scattering rate $ 1/\tau^*_{tr}$. We show that in the archetypal correlated material V2O3, $\omega_p^*$ increases with increasing temperature, while the plasma frequency from partial sum rule exhibits the opposite trend . $ 1/\tau^*_{tr}$ has a more pronounced temperature dependence than the scattering rate obtained from the extended Drude analysis. The theoretical calculations of these quantities are in quantitative agreement with experiment. We conjecture that these are robust properties of all strongly correlated metals, and test it by carrying out a similar analysis on thin film NdNiO3 on LaAlO3 substrate.