Strange metal and Fermi arcs from disordering spin stripes

TL;DR

This paper explores how disordering spin stripes and thermal fluctuations lead to strange metal behavior and Fermi arcs, revealing new insights into quantum criticality and electronic spectral features.

Contribution

It introduces a model where potential disorder induces a quantum critical point with strange metal characteristics and explains the emergence of Fermi arcs from short-range antiferromagnetic correlations.

Findings

Disorder in spin stripes causes a quantum critical point with strange metal properties.

Thermal fluctuations produce Fermi arcs with short antiferromagnetic correlation lengths.

Disordered spin-density wave states exhibit pronounced Fermi arcs in spectral weight.

Abstract

We revisit the effective theory for fluctuating spin stripes coupled to a Fermi surface, and consider the parameter regime where a spin nematic phase intervenes between the spin density wave state and the symmetric state. It is shown that adding potential disorder to this theory, which acts as an unconventional type of random-field disorder, naturally gives rise to a phase diagram containing a quantum critical point that is described by the universal theory of strange metals with spatial disorder in both the magnitude and sign of the electron-boson coupling term [A.A. Patel, H. Guo, I. Esterlis and S. Sachdev, Science 381, 790 (2023)]. One difference compared to the original theory, however, is that at non-zero temperatures the disordered spin-stripe model automatically self-averages over the sign of the coupling. We also study the effects of thermal fluctuations in a phenomenological model for the disordered spin density wave state, and find from Monte Carlo simulations that a short anti-ferromagnetic correlation length (order 4-5 lattice constants) already leads to pronounced Fermi arcs in the electronic spectral weight.