Role of generic scale invariance in a Mott transition from a U(1) spin-liquid insulator to a Landau Fermi-liquid metal

TL;DR

This paper explores how scale invariance influences the Mott transition from a U(1) spin-liquid insulator to a Fermi-liquid metal, highlighting the role of gauge fluctuations and dangerously irrelevant operators in quantum criticality.

Contribution

It provides a novel renormalization group analysis revealing the impact of dangerously irrelevant operators and emergent one-dimensional dynamics on the Mott transition.

Findings

Dangerously irrelevant operators affect the critical behavior.

Overdamped U(1) gauge-field fluctuations do not renormalize charge and spinon dynamics.

Coupling between gauge fields and matter fields persists, leading to unique mean-field criticality.

Abstract

We investigate the role of generic scale invariance in a Mott transition from a U(1) spin-liquid insulator to a Landau Fermi-liquid metal, where there exist massless degrees of freedom in addition to quantum critical fluctuations. Here, the Mott quantum criticality is described by critical charge fluctuations, and additional gapless excitations are U(1) gauge-field fluctuations coupled to a spinon Fermi surface in the spin-liquid state, which turn out to play a central role in the Mott transition. An interesting feature of this problem is that the scaling dimension of effective leading local interactions between critical charge fluctuations differs from that of the coupling constant between U(1) gauge fields and matter-field fluctuations in the presence of a Fermi surface. As a result, there appear dangerously irrelevant operators, which can cause conceptual difficulty in the implementation of renormalization group (RG) transformations. Indeed, we find that the curvature term along the angular direction of the spinon Fermi surface is dangerously irrelevant at this spin-liquid Mott quantum criticality, responsible for divergence of the self-energy correction term in U(1) gauge-field fluctuations. Performing the RG analysis in the one-loop level based on the dimensional regularization method, we reveal that such extremely overdamped dynamics of U(1) gauge-field fluctuations, which originates from the emergent one-dimensional dynamics of spinons, does not cause any renormalization effects to the effective dynamics of both critical charge fluctuations and spinon excitations. However, it turns out that the coupling between U(1) gauge-field fluctuations and both matter-field excitations still persists at this Mott transition, which results in novel mean-field dynamics to explain the nature of the spin-liquid Mott quantum criticality.