Holographic Strange Metals for Philosophers and Physicists

TL;DR

This paper explores the physics and philosophical implications of strange metals, highlighting how holographic duality offers a novel explanation for their anomalous properties beyond standard condensed-matter theories.

Contribution

It introduces the application of holographic duality to strange metals and discusses the philosophical questions regarding holography's explanatory role.

Findings

Strange metals exhibit unusual electrical and thermal properties.

Holography provides a unique framework to explain strange-metal behaviour.

The paper discusses philosophical implications of holographic explanations.

Abstract

This paper introduces the physics and philosophy of strange metals, which are characterized by unusual electrical and thermal properties that deviate from conventional metallic behaviour. The anomalous strange-metal behaviour discussed here appears in the normal state of a copper-oxide high-temperature superconductor, and it cannot be described using standard condensed-matter physics. Currently, it can only be described through a holographic dual, viz.~a four-dimensional black hole in anti-de Sitter spacetime. This paper first introduces the theory of, and specific experiments carried out on, strange metals. Then it discusses a number of philosophical questions that strange metals open up regarding the experimental evidence for holography and its realist interpretation. Strange metals invert the explanatory arrows, in that usual holographic arguments are seen as giving explanations of the bulk quantum-gravity theory from the boundary. By contrast, the aim here is, by using holography, to explain the experimentally discovered and anomalous properties of strange metals.