Shining light on transition metal oxides: unveiling the hidden Fermi Liquid

Abstract

We use low energy optical spectroscopy and first principles LDA+DMFT calculations to test the hypothesis that the anomalous transport properties of strongly correlated metals originate in the strong temperature dependence of their underlying resilient quasiparticles. We express the resistivity in terms of an effective plasma frequency $ω_p^*$ and an effective scattering rate $ 1/τ^*_{tr}$. We show that in the archetypal correlated material V2O3, $ω_p^*$ increases with increasing temperature, while the plasma frequency from partial sum rule exhibits the opposite trend . $ 1/τ^*_{tr}$ has a more pronounced temperature dependence than the scattering rate obtained from the extended Drude analysis. The theoretical calculations of these quantities are in quantitative agreement with experiment. We conjecture that these are robust properties of all strongly correlated metals, and test it by carrying out a similar analysis on thin film NdNiO3 on LaAlO3 substrate.

6 pages, 5 figures including appendix