Pomeranchuk Instability in a non-Fermi Liquid from Holography

Abstract

The Pomeranchuk instability, in which an isotropic Fermi surface distorts and becomes anisotropic due to strong interactions, is a possible mechanism for the growing number of experimental systems which display transport properties that differ along the $x$ and $y$ axes. We show here that the gauge-gravity duality can be used to describe such an instability in fermionic systems. Our holographic model consists of fermions in a background which describes the causal propagation of a massive neutral spin-two field in an asymptotically AdS spacetime. The Fermi surfaces in the boundary theory distort spontaneously and become anisotropic once the neutral massive spin-two field develops a normalizable mode in the bulk. Analysis of the fermionic correlators reveals that the low-lying fermionic excitations are non-Fermi liquid-like both before and after the Fermi surface shape distortion. Further, the spectral weight along the Fermi surface is angularly dependent and can be made to vanish along certain directions.