Deconfined Fermi liquid to Fermi liquid transition and superconducting instability (2401.08753v2)

Abstract: Deconfined quantum critical points (DQCP) have attracted lots of attentions in the past decades, but were mainly restricted to incompressible phases. On the other hand, various experimental puzzles call for new theory of unconventional quantum criticality between metals at a generic density. Here we explore the possibility of a deconfined transition between two symmetric Fermi liquids in a bilayer model tuned by inter-layer antiferromagnetic spin-spin coupling $J_\perp$. Across the transition the Fermi surface volume per flavor jumps by $1/2$ of the Brillouin zone (BZ), similar to the small to large Fermi surface transitions in heavy Fermion systems and maybe also in the high Tc cuprates. But in the bilayer case the small Fermi surface phase (dubbed as sFL) has neither symmetry breaking nor fractionalization, akin to the symmetric mass generation (SMG) discussed in high energy physics. We formulate a deconfined critical theory where the two Fermi liquids correspond to higgs and/or confined phases of a $U(1)\times U(1)$ gauge theory. We show that this deconfined FL to FL transition (DFFT) fixed point is unstable to pairing and thus a superconductor dome is expected at low temperature. At finite temperature above the pairing scale, microscopic electron is a three particle bound state of the deconfined fractional fermions in the critical theory. We also introduce another parameter which can suppress the pairing instability, leading to a deconfined tri-critical point stable to zero temperature. We also provide numerical results of the bilayer model in one dimension, with a Luther-Emery liquid between two different Luttinger liquids, similar to the phase diagram from the field theory in two dimension. Our work opens a new direction to exploring deconfined metallic criticality and new pairing mechanism from critical gauge field.