Emergent quasiparticles at Luttinger surfaces

Nat Commun. 2022 Mar 23;13(1):1561. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29190-y.

Abstract

In periodic systems of interacting electrons, Fermi and Luttinger surfaces refer to the locations within the Brillouin zone of poles and zeros, respectively, of the single-particle Green's function at zero energy and temperature. Such difference in analytic properties underlies the emergence of well-defined quasiparticles close to a Fermi surface, in contrast to their supposed non-existence close to a Luttinger surface, where the single-particle density-of-states vanishes at zero energy. We here show that, contrary to such common belief, dispersive 'quasiparticles' with infinite lifetime do exist also close to a pseudo-gapped Luttinger surface. Thermodynamic and dynamic properties of such 'quasiparticles' are just those of conventional ones. For instance, they yield well-defined quantum oscillations in Luttinger surface and linear-in-temperature specific heat, which is striking given the vanishing density of states of physical electrons, but actually not uncommon in strongly correlated materials.