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The authors uncover an insulator-to-metal crossover in the magnetic-field-induced normal state of infinite-layer nickelate thin films, near the edge of its superconducting dome.

Strange metals possess transport properties that are markedly different from those of a conventional Fermi liquid. Despite strong similarities in behavior exhibited by distinct families, a consistent description of strange metallic transport and, in particular, its evolution from low to high magnetic field strength H, is still lacking. The electron nematic FeSe1−xSx is one such strange metal displaying anomalous H/T scaling in its transverse magnetoresistance as well as a separation of transport and Hall lifetimes at low H beyond its (nematic) quantum critical point at xc ∼ 0.17. Here we report a study of the Hall response of FeSe1−xSx across xc in fields up to 33 T. Upon subtraction of a normal H-linear component from the total Hall response (imposed by perfect charge compensation), we find a second component, ascribable to strange metal physics, that grows as 1/T upon approach to the quantum critical point. Through this decomposition, we reveal that lifetime separation is indeed driven primarily by the presence of the strange metal component.

Significance The magnetic-field scale at which superconducting vortices persist in underdoped cuprate superconductors has remained a controversial subject. Here we present an electrical transport study on three distinctly different cuprate families, at temperatures down to 0.32 K and magnetic fields up to 45 T. We reveal the presence of an anomalous vortex liquid state with a highly nonohmic resistivity in all three materials, irrespective of the level of disorder or structural details. The doping and field regime over which this anomalous vortex state persists suggests its occurrence is tied to the presence of long-range charge order under high magnetic field. Our results demonstrate that the intricate interplay between charge order and superconductivity can lead to an exotic vortex state., The interplay between charge order and d-wave superconductivity in high-Tc cuprates remains an open question. While mounting evidence from spectroscopic probes indicates that charge order competes with superconductivity, to date little is known about the impact of charge order on charge transport in the mixed state, when vortices are present. Here we study the low-temperature electrical resistivity of three distinctly different cuprate families under intense magnetic fields, over a broad range of hole doping and current excitations. We find that the electronic transport in the doping regime where long-range charge order is known to be present is characterized by a nonohmic resistivity, the identifying feature of an anomalous vortex liquid. The field and temperature range in which this nonohmic behavior occurs indicates that the presence of long-range charge order is closely related to the emergence of this anomalous vortex liquid, near a vortex solid boundary that is defined by the excitation current in the T→ 0 limit. Our findings further suggest that this anomalous vortex liquid, a manifestation of fragile superconductivity with a suppressed critical current density, is ubiquitous in the high-field state of charge-ordered cuprates.

Strange metals possess highly unconventional transport characteristics, such as a linear-in-temperature ($T$) resistivity, an inverse Hall angle that varies as $T^2$ and a linear-in-field ($H$) magnetoresistance. Identifying the origin of these collective anomalies has proved profoundly challenging, even in materials such as the hole-doped cuprates that possess a simple band structure. The prevailing dogma is that strange metallicity in the cuprates is tied to a quantum critical point at a doping $p*$ inside the superconducting dome. Here, we study the high-field in-plane magnetoresistance of two superconducting cuprate families at doping levels beyond $p*$. At all dopings, the magnetoresistance exhibits quadrature scaling and becomes linear at high $H/T$ ratios. Moreover, its magnitude is found to be much larger than predicted by conventional theory and insensitive to both impurity scattering and magnetic field orientation. These observations, coupled with analysis of the zero-field and Hall resistivities, suggest that despite having a single band, the cuprate strange metal phase hosts two charge sectors, one containing coherent quasiparticles, the other scale-invariant `Planckian' dissipators., Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures and 3 tables (including Supplementary Information)

Metallic iridium oxides (iridates) provide a fertile playground to explore new phenomena resulting from the interplay between topological protection, spin-orbit and electron-electron interactions. To date, however, few studies of the low energy electronic excitations exist due to the difficulty in synthesising crystals with sufficiently large carrier mean-free-paths. Here, we report the observation of Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations in high-quality single crystals of monoclinic SrIrO3 in magnetic fields up to 35 T. Analysis of the oscillations reveals a Fermi surface comprising multiple small pockets with effective masses up to 4.5 times larger than the calculated band mass. Ab-initio calculations reveal robust linear band-crossings at the Brillouin zone boundary, due to its non-symmorphic symmetry, and overall we find good agreement between the angular dependence of the oscillations and the theoretical expectations. Further evidence of strong electron correlations is realized through the observation of signatures of non-Fermi liquid transport as well as a large Kadowaki-Woods ratio. These collective findings, coupled with knowledge of the evolution of the electronic state across the Ruddlesden-Popper iridate series, establishes monoclinic SrIrO3 as a topological semimetal on the boundary of the Mott metal-insulator transition. © 2021, The Author(s). We gratefully acknowledge useful discussions with A. Rost and D. F. McMorrow. We would also like to thank G. Stenning and D. Nye for help with the instruments in the Materials Characterisation Laboratory at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Kuang-Yu Samuel Chang and Roos Leenen for technical assistance with the DFT calculations, and Sebastian Bette for XRD characterizations. We acknowledge the support of the HFML-Radboud University (RU)/Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a member of the European Magnetic Field Laboratory. This work is part of the research program Strange Metals (Grant 16METL01) of the former Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter, which is financially supported by the NWO and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 835279-Catch-22). We gratefully acknowledge support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences research council, grant EP/N034694/1. We acknowledge collaborative support from A.S. Gibbs, D. Fortes and the ISIS Crystallography Group for making available the 193Ir for the isotope work. Experiments at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source were supported by a beamtime allocation RB1990395, DOI:10.5286/ISIS.E.RB1990395, from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The work of D. P. and V. M. was supported by Act 211 Government of the Russian Federation, contract 02.A03.21.0006.

There is now compelling evidence that the normal state of superconducting overdoped cuprates is a strange metal comprising two distinct charge sectors, one governed by coherent quasiparticle excitations, the other seemingly incoherent and characterized by non-quasiparticle (Planckian) dissipation. The zero-temperature superfluid density n_s(0)ns(0) of overdoped cuprates exhibits an anomalous depletion with increased hole doping pp, falling to zero at the edge of the superconducting dome. Over the same doping range, the effective zero-temperature Hall number n_{\rm H}(0) transitions from pp to 1 + pp. By taking into account the presence of these two charge sectors, we demonstrate that in the overdoped cuprates Tl_22Ba_22CuO_{6+\delta}6+δ and La_{2-x}2−xSr_xxCuO_44, the growth in n_s(0)ns(0) as pp is decreased from the overdoped side may be compensated by the loss of carriers in the coherent sector. Such a correspondence is contrary to expectations from conventional BCS theory and implies that superconductivity in overdoped cuprates emerges uniquely from the sector that exhibits incoherent transport in the normal state.

Non-Fermi liquids are strange metals whose physical properties deviate qualitatively from those of conventional metals due to strong quantum fluctuations. In this paper, we report transport measurements on theFeSe1−xSx superconductor, which has a quantum critical point of a nematic order without accompanying antiferromagnetism. We find that in addition to a linear-in-temperature resistivity ρ_xx ∝ T , which is close to the Planckian limit, the Hall angle varies as cot(θ_H) ∝ T^2 and the low-field magnetoresistance is well scaled as Dρ_xx/ρ_xx ∝ tan^2(θ_H) in the vicinity of the nematic quantum critical point. This set of anomalous charge transport properties show striking resemblance with those reported in cuprate, iron-pnictide, and heavy fermion superconductors, demonstrating that the critical fluctuations of a nematic order with q ≈ 0 can also lead to a breakdown of the Fermi liquid description.

We present optical measurements of the transition metal dichalcogenide PdTe$_{2}$. The reflectivity displays an unusual temperature and energy dependence in the far-infrared, which we show can only be explained by a collapse of the scattering rate at low temperature, resulting from the vicinity of a van Hove singularity near the Fermi energy. An analysis of the optical conductivity suggests that below 150 K a reduction in the available phase space for scattering takes place, resulting in long-lived quasiparticle excitations. We suggest that this reduction in phase space provides experimental evidence for a van Hove singularity close to the Fermi level. Our data furthermore indicates a very weak electron-phonon coupling. Combined this suggests that the superconducting transition temperature is set by the density of states associated with the van Hove singularity., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures