Non-Fermi liquid and topological states with strong spin-orbit coupling

Understand

We argue that a class of strongly spin-orbit coupled materials, including some pyrochlore iridates and the inverted band gap semiconductor HgTe, may be described by a minimal model consisting of the Luttinger Hamiltonian supplemented by Coulomb interactions, a problem studied by Abrikosov and collaborators.

• It contains two-fold degenerate conduction and valence bands touching quadratically at the zone center.
• Using modern renormalization group methods, we update and extend Abrikosov's classic work and show that interactions induce a quantum critical non-Fermi liquid phase, stable provided time-reversal and cubic symmetries are maintained.
• We determine the universal power-law exponents describing various observables in this "Luttinger Abrikosov Beneslavskii" state, which include conductivity, specific heat,non-linear susceptibility and magnetic Gruneisen number.