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Abstract:

Non-Fermi liquids are metals that cannot be adiabatically deformed into free fermion states. We argue for the existence of "non-Fermi glasses" phases of interacting disordered fermions that are fully many-body localized (MBL), yet cannot be deformed into an Anderson insulator without an eigenstate phase transition. We explore the properties of such non-Fermi glasses, focusing on a specific solvable example. At high temperature, non-Fermi glasses have qualitatively similar spectral features to Anderson insulators. We identify a diagnostic, based on ratios of correlators, that sharply distinguishes between the two phases even at infinite temperature. Our results and diagnostic should generically apply to the high-temperature behavior of MBL descendants of fractionalized phases.

Abstract:

© 2017 American Physical Society. We study the competition between Kondo screening and frustrated magnetism on the nonsymmorphic Shastry-Sutherland Kondo lattice at a filling of two conduction electrons per unit cell. This model is known to host a set of gapless partially Kondo screened phases intermediate between the Kondo-destroyed paramagnet and the heavy Fermi liquid. Based on crystal symmetries, we argue that (i) both the paramagnet and the heavy Fermi liquid are semimetals protected by a glide symmetry; and (ii) partial Kondo screening breaks the symmetry, removing this protection and allowing the partially Kondo screened phase to be deformed into a Kondo insulator via a Lifshitz transition. We confirm these results using large-N mean-field theory and then use nonperturbative arguments to derive a generalized Luttinger sum rule constraining the phase structure of two-dimensional nonsymmorphic Kondo lattices beyond the mean-field limit.

Abstract:

© 2017 American Physical Society. We study transport across p-n junctions of gapped two-dimensional semi-Dirac materials: nodal semimetals whose energy bands disperse quadratically and linearly along distinct crystal axes. The resulting electronic properties - relevant to materials such as TiO2/VO2 multilayers and α-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 salts - continuously interpolate between those of mono- and bilayer graphene as a function of propagation angle. We demonstrate that tunneling across the junction depends on the orientation of the tunnel barrier relative to the crystalline axes, leading to strongly nonmonotonic current-voltage characteristics, including negative differential conductance in some regimes. In multivalley systems, these features provide a natural route to engineering valley-selective transport.