Doping a semiconductor to create an unconventional metal

Landau Fermi liquid theory, with its pivotal assertion that electrons in metals can be simply understood as independent particles with effective masses replacing the free electron mass, has been astonishingly successful. This is true despite the Coulomb interactions an electron experiences from the host crystal lattice, its defects, and the other ~1022/cm3 electrons. An important extension to the theory accounts for the behaviour of doped semiconductors1,2. Because little in the vast literature on materials contradicts Fermi liquid theory and its extensions, exceptions have attracted great attention, and they include the high temperature superconductors3, silicon-based field effect transistors which host two-dimensional metals4, and certain rare earth compounds at the threshold of magnetism5-8. The origin of the non-Fermi liquid behaviour in all of these systems remains controversial. Here we report that an entirely different and exceedingly simple class of materials - doped small gap semiconductors near a metal-insulator transition - can also display a non-Fermi liquid state. Remarkably, a modest magnetic field functions as a switch which restores the ordinary disordered Fermi liquid. Our data suggest that we have finally found a physical realization of the only mathematically rigourous route to a non-Fermi liquid, namely the 'undercompensated Kondo effect', where there are too few mobile electrons to compensate for the spins of unpaired electrons localized on impurity atoms9-12.Comment: 17 pages 4 figures supplemental information included with 2 figure

Superconducting spintronics

The interaction between superconducting and spin-polarized orders has recently emerged as a major research field following a series of fundamental breakthroughs in charge transport in superconductor-ferromagnet heterodevices which promise new device functionality. Traditional studies which combine spintronics and superconductivity have mainly focused on the injection of spin-polarized quasiparticles into superconducting materials. However, a complete synergy between superconducting and magnetic orders turns out to be possible through the creation of spin-triplet Cooper pairs which are generated at carefully engineered superconductor interfaces with ferromagnetic materials. Currently, there is intense activity focused on identifying materials combinations which merge superconductivity and spintronics in order to enhance device functionality and performance. The results look promising: it has been shown, for example, that superconducting order can greatly enhance central effects in spintronics such as spin injection and magnetoresistance. Here, we review the experimental and theoretical advances in this field and provide an outlook for upcoming challenges related to the new concept of superconducting spintronics.J.L. was supported by the Research Council of Norway, Grants No. 205591 and 216700. J.W.A.R. was supported by the UK Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust through an International Network Grant (IN-2013-033).This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n4/full/nphys3242.html

U(1) slave-particle study of the finite-temperature doped Hubbard model in one and two dimensions

One-dimensional systems have unusual properties such as fractionalization of degrees of freedom. The occurrence of similar phenomena in higher dimensional systems has been considered in the literature for the description of quantum spin liquids and some non-fermi liquid phases. In this work we construct a mean field (MF) theory of the Hubbard model which is based on a representation of the electronic fields that explicitly introduces a separation of the charge and spin degrees of freedom (the so-called Zou–Anderson transformation) and study the finite-temperature phase diagram for the Hubbard chain and square lattice. The mean field variables are defined along the links of the underlying lattice. We obtain the spectral function and identify the regions of higher spectral weight with the fractionalized fermionic (spin) and bosonic (charge) excitations

Enhancement of the critical temperature in iron-pnictide superconductors by finite size effects

Recent experiments have shown that in agreement with previous theoretical predictions, superconductivity in nanostructures can be enhanced with respect to the bulk (L→∞) limit. Motivated by these results, we study finite size effects (FSEs) in iron pnictide superconductors. We employ a five-band mean-field approach that reproduces quantitatively the band structure of these materials around the Fermi energy. For realistic values of the bulk critical temperature Tcbulk∼20−50 K, we find that Tc(L) has a complicated oscillating pattern as a function of the system size L. For a simplified two-band model we show analytically that these oscillations are caused by fluctuations of the spectral density around the Fermi energy. We identify a scale L∼10 nm for which deviations from mean fields, not included in our model, are small but still Tc(L) is higher than Tcbulk. Similar results are obtained for different boundary conditions and geometries. Finally we show that the differential conductance, an experimental observable, is also very sensitive to FSE

Supercurrent induced domain wall motion

We study the dynamics of a magnetic domain wall, inserted in, or juxtaposed to, a conventional superconductor, via the passage of a spin polarized current through a ferromagnet-superconductor-ferromagnet junction. Solving the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation of motion for the magnetic moments, we calculate the velocity of the domain wall and compare it with the case of a ferromagnet-normal-ferromagnet junction. We find that in several regimes the domain wall velocity is higher when it is driven by a supercurrent