Strange metal from holography

Speaker: John McGreevy, MIT

When: October 26, 2009 (Mon), 12:30PM to 01:30PM (add to my calendar)

This event is part of the HET Seminar Series.

ABSTRACT: This talk is about a class of non-Fermi liquids, identified using the AdS/CFT correspondence. After motivating the study of non-Fermi liquids, I will describe the calculation of response functions of composite fermionic operators in certain strongly-interacting quantum field theories at finite density, using a classical gravity theory. They exhibit Fermi surfaces: gapless fermionic excitations at discrete shells in momentum space. The low-energy excitations near such a Fermi suface are not Landau quasiparticles. For some values of the parameters of the gravity theory, the system is a marginal Fermi liquid,’ a phenomenological model of thestrange metal’ phase of high temperature superconductors. The contribution to the conductivity from these holographic Fermi surfaces has a temperature dependence consistent with the application to strange metal.