Doping the holographic Mott insulator

TL;DR

This paper uses holographic duality to construct and analyze entangled Mott insulators from non-Fermi liquid metals, revealing both classical and novel properties relevant to cuprate superconductors.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic framework to model Mott insulators starting from entangled metallic states, uncovering new physical traits and insights into high-temperature superconductor phenomena.

Findings

Mott gap formation in optical conductivity

Divergent DC resistivity with algebraic temperature dependence

Stripe formation with unconventional ordering wave vectors

Abstract

Mott insulators form because of strong electron repulsions, being at the heart of strongly correlated electron physics. Conventionally these are understood as classical "traffic jams" of electrons described by a short-ranged entangled product ground state. Exploiting the holographic duality, which maps the physics of densely entangled matter onto gravitational black hole physics, we show how Mott-insulators can be constructed departing from entangled non-Fermi liquid metallic states, such as the strange metals found in cuprate superconductors. These "entangled Mott insulators" have traits in common with the "classical" Mott insulators, such as the formation of Mott gap in the optical conductivity, super-exchange-like interactions, and form "stripes" when doped. They also exhibit new properties: the ordering wave vectors are detached from the number of electrons in the unit cell, and the DC resistivity diverges algebraically instead of exponentially as function of temperature. These results may shed light on the mysterious ordering phenomena observed in underdoped cuprates.