Physics Research Conference

It is easy to have metallic phases of fermions but much harder to imagine metallic phases of bosons at zero temperature. I will describe one route to construct such "Bose-metals" theoretically by splintering bosons into itinerant partons and will focus on our studies of candidate frustrated spin and boson models with ring exchanges to realize such phases. The spin model is relevant for the recently discovered gapless spin liquids in two organic antiferromagnetic materials that do not show any signs of magnetic order and have unusual metal-like thermal properties despite being electrical insulators. The construction of generic Bose-metals can be used as a stepping stone towards understanding exotic metallic phases of electrons that are qualitatively distinct from the paradigmatic Landau Fermi liquids; the main motivation here comes from observations of non-Fermi-liquid itinerant electron states in strongly correlated materials such as the strange metal and pseudogap phases in the high-Tc cuprates.