TY - JOUR
T1 - Bad-metal relaxation dynamics in a Fermi lattice gas
AU - Xu, W.
AU - McGehee, W. R.
AU - Morong, W. N.
AU - DeMarco, B.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Electrical current in conventional metals is carried by electrons that retain their individual character. Bad metals, such as the normal state of some high-temperature superconductors, violate this scenario, and the complete picture for their behavior remains unresolved. Here, we report phenomena consistent with bad-metal behaviour in an optical-lattice Hubbard model by measuring the transport lifetime for a mass current excited by stimulated Raman transitions. We demonstrate incompatibility with weak-scattering theory and key characteristics of bad metals: anomalous resistivity scaling consistent with T-linear behavior, the onset of incoherent transport, and the approach to the Mott–Ioffe–Regel limit. Our work demonstrates a direct method for determining the transport lifetime, which is critical to theory but difficult to measure in materials, and exposes minimal ingredients for bad-metal behavior.
AB - Electrical current in conventional metals is carried by electrons that retain their individual character. Bad metals, such as the normal state of some high-temperature superconductors, violate this scenario, and the complete picture for their behavior remains unresolved. Here, we report phenomena consistent with bad-metal behaviour in an optical-lattice Hubbard model by measuring the transport lifetime for a mass current excited by stimulated Raman transitions. We demonstrate incompatibility with weak-scattering theory and key characteristics of bad metals: anomalous resistivity scaling consistent with T-linear behavior, the onset of incoherent transport, and the approach to the Mott–Ioffe–Regel limit. Our work demonstrates a direct method for determining the transport lifetime, which is critical to theory but difficult to measure in materials, and exposes minimal ingredients for bad-metal behavior.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-019-09526-x
DO - 10.1038/s41467-019-09526-x
M3 - Article
C2 - 30962438
AN - SCOPUS:85064077841
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 10
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 1588
ER -