Conductivity of weakly disordered metals close to a "ferromagnetic" quantum critical point

Abstract

We calculate analytically the conductivity of weakly disordered metals close to a "ferromagnetic" quantum critical point in the low temperature regime. Ferromagnetic in the sense that the effective carrier potential $V(q,\omega)$, due to critical fluctuations, is peaked at zero momentum $q=0$. Vertex corrections, due to both critical fluctuations and impurity scattering, are explicitly considered. We find that only the vertex corrections due to impurity scattering, combined with the self-energy, generate appreciable effects as a function of the temperature $T$ and the control parameter $a$, which measures the proximity to the critical point. Our results are consistent with resistivity experiments in several materials displaying typical Fermi liquid behavior, but with a diverging prefactor of the $T^2$ term for small $a$.