Strange metal in paramagnetic heavy-fermion Kondo lattice: Dynamical large-N fermionic multi-channel approach

Abstract

The mechanism of strange metal (SM) with unconventional charge transport near magnetic phase transitions has become an outstanding open problem in correlated electron systems. Recently, an exotic quantum critical SM phase was observed in paramagnetic frustrated heavy-fermion materials near Kondo breakdown. We establish a controlled theoretical framework to this issue via a dynamical large-N fermionic multichannel approach to the two-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model, where KB transition separates a heavy-Fermi liquid from fermionic spin-liquid state. With Kondo fluctuations being fully considered, we find a distinct SM behavior with quasi-linear-in-temperature scattering rate associated with KB. When particle-hole symmetry is present, signatures of a critical spin-liquid SM phase as \(T \rightarrow 0\) are revealed with \(\omega/T\) scaling extended to a wide range. We attribute these features to the interplay of critical bosonic charge (Kondo) fluctuations and gapless fermionic spinons. The implications of our results for the experiments are discussed.