Soft fermi surfaces and breakdown of Fermi-liquid behavior

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Aug 8;91(6):066402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.066402. Epub 2003 Aug 4.

Abstract

Electron-electron interactions can induce Fermi surface deformations which break the point-group symmetry of the lattice structure of the system. In the vicinity of such a "Pomeranchuk instability" the Fermi surface is easily deformed by anisotropic perturbations, and exhibits enhanced collective fluctuations. We show that critical Fermi surface fluctuations near a d-wave Pomeranchuk instability in two dimensions lead to large anisotropic decay rates for single-particle excitations, which destroy Fermi-liquid behavior over the whole surface except at the Brillouin zone diagonal.