Mottness Collapse and T-linear Resistivity in Cuprate Superconductors

Abstract: Central to the normal state of cuprate high-temperature superconductors is the collapse of the pseudogap, briefly reviewed here, at a critical point and the subsequent onset of the strange-metal characterized by a resistivity that scales linearly with temperature. A possible clue to the resolution of this problem is the inter-relation between two facts: 1) A robust theory of T-linear resistivity resulting from quantum criticality requires an additional length scale outside the standard 1-parameter scaling scenario and 2) breaking the Landau correspondence between the Fermi gas and an interacting system with short-range repulsions requires non-fermionic degrees. We show that a low-energy theory of the Hubbard model which correctly incorporates dynamical spectral weight transfer has the extra degrees of freedom needed to describe this physics. The degrees of freedom that mix into the lower band as a result of dynamical spectral weight transfer are shown to either decouple beyond a critical doping, thereby signaling Mottness collapse or unbind above a critical temperature yielding strange metal behaviour characterised by $T-$linear resistivity.