Flat electronic bands are expected to show proportionally enhanced electron correlations, which may generate a plethora of novel quantum phases and unusual low-energy excitations. They are increasingly being pursued in d-electron-based systems with crystalline lattices that feature destructive electronic interference, where they are often topological. Such flat bands, though, are generically located far away from the Fermi energy, which limits their capacity to partake in the low-energy physics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrustrated spin systems have traditionally proven challenging to understand, owing to a scarcity of controlled methods for their analyses. By contrast, under strong magnetic fields, certain aspects of spin systems admit simpler and universal description in terms of hardcore bosons. The bosonic formalism is anchored by the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), which has helped explain the behaviors of a wide range of magnetic compounds under applied magnetic fields.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStrange-metal behavior has been observed in materials ranging from high-temperature superconductors to heavy fermion metals. In conventional metals, current is carried by quasiparticles; although it has been suggested that quasiparticles are absent in strange metals, direct experimental evidence is lacking. We measured shot noise to probe the granularity of the current-carrying excitations in nanowires of the heavy fermion strange metal YbRhSi.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe propose a general framework for constructing a large set of nodal-point semimetals by tuning the number of linearly (d_{L}) and (at most) quadratically (d_{Q}) dispersing directions. By virtue of such a unifying scheme, we identify a new perturbative route to access various strongly interacting non-Dirac semimetals with d_{Q}>0. As a demonstrative example, we relate a two-dimensional anisotropic semimetal with d_{L}=d_{Q}=1, describing the topological transition between a Dirac semimetal and a normal insulator, and its three-dimensional counterparts with d_{L}=1, d_{Q}=2.
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