The Holographic Disorder-Driven Supeconductor-Metal Transition

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

We implement the effects of disorder on a holographic superconductor by introducing a random chemical potential on the boundary. We demonstrate explicitly that increasing disorder leads to the formation of islands where the superconducting order is enhanced and subsequently to the transition to a metal. We study the behavior of the superfluid density and of the conductivity as a function of the strength of disorder. We find explanations for various marked features in the conductivities in terms of hydrodynamic quasi-normal modes of the holographic superconductors. These identifications plus a particular disorder-dependent spectral weight shift in the conductivity point to a signature of the Higgs mode in the context of disordered holographic superconductors. We observe that the behavior of the order parameter close to the transition is not mean-field type as in the clean case, rather we find robust agreement with \(\exp(- A\, |T-T_c|^{-\nu})\), with \(\nu =1.03\pm 0.02 \) for this disorder-driven smeared transition.

Related collections

Most cited references 4

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Metal-insulator transition in a weakly interacting many-electron system with localized single-particle states

B. L. Altshuler, D M Basko, I Aleiner (2005)

We consider low-temperature behavior of weakly interacting electrons in disordered conductors in the regime when all single-particle eigenstates are localized by the quenched disorder. We prove that in the absence of coupling of the electrons to any external bath dc electrical conductivity exactly vanishes as long as the temperatute \(T\) does not exceed some finite value \(T_c\). At the same time, it can be also proven that at high enough \(T\) the conductivity is finite. These two statements imply that the system undergoes a finite temperature Metal-to-Insulator transition, which can be viewed as Anderson-like localization of many-body wave functions in the Fock space. Metallic and insulating states are not different from each other by any spatial or discrete symmetries. We formulate the effective Hamiltonian description of the system at low energies (of the order of the level spacing in the single-particle localization volume). In the metallic phase quantum Boltzmann equation is valid, allowing to find the kinetic coefficients. In the insulating phase, \(T

0 comments Cited 459 times – based on 0 reviews

Preprint

     Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

What can gauge-gravity duality teach us about condensed matter physics?

Subir Sachdev (2011)

I discuss the impact of gauge-gravity duality on our understanding of two classes of systems: conformal quantum matter and compressible quantum matter. The first conformal class includes systems, such as the boson Hubbard model in two spatial dimensions, which display quantum critical points described by conformal field theories. Questions associated with non-zero temperature dynamics and transport are difficult to answer using conventional field theoretic methods. I argue that many of these can be addressed systematically using gauge-gravity duality, and discuss the prospects for reliable computation of low frequency correlations. Compressible quantum matter is characterized by the smooth dependence of the charge density, associated with a global U(1) symmetry, upon a chemical potential. Familiar examples are solids, superfluids, and Fermi liquids, but there are more exotic possibilities involving deconfined phases of gauge fields in the presence of Fermi surfaces. I survey the compressible systems studied using gauge-gravity duality, and discuss their relationship to the condensed matter classification of such states. The gravity methods offer hope of a deeper understanding of exotic and strongly-coupled compressible quantum states.

0 comments Cited 40 times – based on 0 reviews

Preprint

     Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Atomic-scale images of charge ordering in a mixed-valence manganite

G. Aeppli, B-G. Kim, S. Cheong … (2002)

Transition-metal perovskite oxides exhibit a wide range of extraordinary but imperfectly understood phenomena. Charge, spin, orbital, and lattice degrees of freedom all undergo order-disorder transitions in regimes not far from where the best-known of these phenomena, namely high-temperature superconductivity of the copper oxides, and the 'colossal' magnetoresistance of the manganese oxides, occur. Mostly diffraction techniques, sensitive either to the spin or the ionic core, have been used to measure the order. Unfortunately, because they are only weakly sensitive to valence electrons and yield superposition of signals from distinct mesoscopic phases, they cannot directly image mesoscopic phase coexistence and charge ordering, two key features of the manganites. Here we describe the first experiment to image charge ordering and phase separation in real space with atomic-scale resolution in a transition metal oxide. Our scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) data show that charge order is correlated with structural order, as well as with whether the material is locally metallic or insulating, thus giving an atomic-scale basis for descriptions of the manganites as mixtures of electronically and structurally distinct phases.