From Birefringent Electrons to a Marginal or Non-Fermi Liquid of Relativistic Spin-1/2 Fermions: An Emergent Superuniversality*

In this talk, we present the quantum critical theory of an interacting nodal Fermi liquid of quasirelativistic pseudospin-3/2 fermions that have a noninteracting birefringent spectrum with two distinct Fermi velocities [1]. As we show, when such quasiparticles interact with gapless bosonic degrees of freedom that mediate either the long-range Coulomb interaction or its short range component (responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking), in the deep infrared or quantum critical regime in two dimensions, the system is, respectively, described by a marginal- or a non-Fermi liquid of relativistic spin-1/2 fermions (possessing a unique velocity), and is always a marginal Fermi liquid in three dimensions. We consider a possible generalization of these scenarios to fermions with an arbitrary half-odd-integer spin, and conjecture that critical spin-1/2 excitations represent a superuniversal description of the entire family of interacting quasirelativistic fermions.

[1] B. Roy, M. P. Kennett, K. Yang, and V. Juričić, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 157602 (2018).