Abstract
The high-temperature normal state of the unconventional cuprate superconductors has resistivity linear in temperature , which persists to values well beyond the Mott-Ioffe-Regel upper bound. At low temperatures, within the pseudogap phase, the resistivity is instead quadratic in , as would be expected from Fermi liquid theory. Developing an understanding of these normal phases of the cuprates is crucial to explain the unconventional superconductivity. We present a simple explanation for this behavior, in terms of the umklapp scattering of electrons. This fits within the general picture emerging from functional renormalization group calculations that spurred the Yang-Rice-Zhang ansatz: Umklapp scattering is at the heart of the behavior in the normal phase.
- Received 18 July 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.96.220502
©2017 American Physical Society