The strange metals forcing us to rethink how electricity really works
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- Strange metals display a linear relationship between resistance and temperature, unlike ordinary metals where resistance rises with the square of temperature — a behavior the late theorist Joseph Polchinski once called 'the conductor from Hell.'
- Stephen Hayden at the University of Bristol used neutron beams at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory this year to study electron-spin fluctuations in a strange metal, finding they speed up and slow down in lockstep with temperature — among the strongest evidence yet for the critical-fluctuations theory.
- Subir Sachdev at Harvard has developed an alternative theory since the early 1990s, conceived with Jinwu Ye, that imagines a system with no spatiality in which electrical disturbances fade at a rate proportional to temperature without individually acting particles.
- Strange-metal behavior has been documented across multiple material classes: copper-oxide cuprates, iron pnictides (spotted by Louis Taillefer at the University of Sherbrooke in 2009), twisted graphene layers (Andrea Young and Cory Dean, 2019), and nickelates (Harold Hwang at SLAC).
- Eric Heller at Harvard argued last year that ordinary atomic vibrations could explain strange metals, but most physicists remain unconvinced because vibrations are predicted to freeze out at the low temperatures where strange-metal behavior persists.
- String theory's 'holography' — a 1990s mathematical trick describing everything inside a volume via physics on its enclosing boundary, originally developed for black holes — is being explored as a new framework for understanding strange-metal conductivity.
Why it matters: Landau's quasiparticle theory has underpinned the entire electronics industry for 70 years. The source states that solving strange-metal behavior will also help explain high-temperature superconductivity, which has resisted understanding since the 1980s discovery that earned a Nobel within a year.
