A phenomenological description on an incoherent Fermi liquid near optimal doping in high T_{c} cuprates

Abstract

Marginal Fermi-liquid physics near optimal doping in high T_{c} cuprates has been explained within two competing scenarios such as the spin-fluctuation theory based on an itinerant picture and the slave-particle approach based on a localized picture. In this study we propose an alternative scenario for the anomalous transport within the context of the slave-particle approach. Although the marginal Fermi-liquid phenomenology was interpreted previously within deconfinement of the compact gauge theory, referred to as the strange metal phase, we start from confinement, introducing the Polyakov-loop parameter into an SU(2) gauge theory formulation of the t-J model. The Polyakov-loop parameter gives rise to incoherent electrons through the confinement of spinons and holons, which result from huge imaginary parts of self-energy corrections for spinons and holons. This confinement scenario serves a novel mechanism for the marginal Fermi-liquid transport in the respect that the scattering source has nothing to do with symmetry breaking. Furthermore, the incoherent Fermi-liquid state evolves into the Fermi liquid phase through crossover instead of an artificial second-order transition as temperature is lowered, where the crossover phenomenon does not result from the Anderson-Higgs mechanism but originate from an energy scale in the holon sector. We fit an experimental data for the electrical resistivity around the optimal doping and find a reasonable match between our theory and the experiment.