Transport in the non-Fermi liquid phase of isotropic Luttinger semimetals

Luttinger semimetals have quadratic band crossings at the Brillouin zone-center in three spatial dimensions. Coulomb interactions in a model that describes these systems stabilize a non-trivial fixed point associated with a non-Fermi liquid state, also known as the Luttinger-Abrikosov-Beneslavskii phase. We calculate the optical conductivity $\sigma (\omega )$ and the dc conductivity ${\sigma }_{dc}(T)$ of this phase, by means of the Kubo formula and the Mori-Zwanzig memory matrix method, respectively. Interestingly, we find that $\sigma (\omega )$, as a function of the frequency $\omega$ of an applied ac electric field, is characterized by a small violation of the hyperscaling property in the clean limit, which is in marked contrast to the low-energy effective theories that possess Dirac quasiparticles in the excitation spectrum and obey hyperscaling. Furthermore, the effects of weak short-ranged disorder on the temperature-dependence of ${\sigma }_{dc}(T)$ give rise to a much stronger power-law suppression at low temperatures compared to the clean limit. Our findings demonstrate that these disordered systems are actually power-law insulators. Our theoretical results agree qualitatively with the data from recent experiments performed on Luttinger semimetal compounds like the pyrochlore iridates [ (Y${}_{1-x}$Pr${}_x$)${}_2$Ir${}_2$O${}_7$ ].