Observation of non-Fermi liquid physics in a quantum critical metal via quantum loop topography

Non-Fermi liquid physics is a ubiquitous feature in strongly correlated metals, manifesting itself in anomalous transport properties, such as a T-linear resistivity in experiments. However, its theoretical understanding in terms of microscopic models is lacking despite decades of conceptual work and numerical simulations. Here we demonstrate that a combination of sign problem-free quantum Monte Carlo sampling and quantum loop topography, a physics-inspired machine learning approach, can map out the emergence of non-Fermi liquid physics in the vicinity of a quantum critical point with little prior knowledge. Using only three parameter points for training the underlying neural network, we are able to reproducibly identify a stable non-Fermi liquid regime tracing the fans of metallic quantum critical points at the onset of both spin-density wave and nematic order. Our study thereby provides an important proof-of-principle example that new physics can be detected via unbiased machine-learning approaches.