About this Collaboration
For decades, our understanding of the quantum physics of systems with many interacting degrees of freedom has been based on the notion of seemingly free particles. A crowning achievement in the 20th century is the development by Landau of the Fermi liquid (FL) theory that describes the low energy physics of a fluid of interacting fermions at a non-zero density in terms of electronic "quasiparticles". The quasiparticles share the statistics and quantum numbers of the underlying fermions but are distinct from them. Famously this theory applies to mobile electrons in a metallic solid. Yet this "quasiparticle" paradigm breaks down in dealing with a growing number of challenges posed in modern quantum materials. Foremost among these are strange metals, the most prevalent and arguably the most confounding, which apparently lack quasiparticles of any kind.
The strange metal problem is rightly seen as one of the grand challenges in quantum condensed matter physics. Understanding the low-energy physics of such quantum many body systems in the absence of quasiparticles is not only a fundamental physics puzzle to be resolved for its own sake, but it is also very likely the key to understanding many other phenomena (such as the emergence of multiple "intertwined" ordered states at low temperature).
The goal of the Targeted Simons Research Group on Strange Metals is to establish a predictive theoretical framework for systems like strange metals where the quasiparticle concept fails. The group brings together researchers with expertise at every energy/length scale of the problem — from microscopic numerical methods to experimental phenomenology to field theoretic methods and long wavelength hydrodynamics — to intensely work towards this goal.
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