Koenraad Schalm and his research group publish an article on non-Fermi liquids in the current issue of Physical Review B. Their publication has been selected as Editor’s suggestion.

Metals are good conductors: the outermost electrons can nearly effortlessly skip from atom to atom. The theory behind this—electronic band structure based on Fermi liquid theory developed in the 1950’s—explains why a metal conducts electricity and other non-metallic materials do not. This theory lies at the heart of modern semi-conductor electronics.

In exotic materials, however, electrons interact much stronger than usual and our theoretical understanding fails. High-temperature superconducting copper oxides form a good example. Almost by definition, these materials behave as a non-Fermi liquid, meaning they don’t obey Fermi liquid theory. Schalm and his colleagues describe their research on this topic in a popular summary on the Editor’s suggestion page of Physical Review B.

Publication
Balazs Meszena, Petter Säterskog, Andrey Bagrov and Koenraad Schalm, ‘Non-perturbative emergence of non-Fermi liquid behaviour in d = 2 quantum critical metals’, Physical Review B (2016)