Abstract

Strange metals include a diverse set of materials with anomalous transport properties. Despite their chemical differences, these compounds show broadly similar behavior, often including T-linear resistivity in a “quantum critical fan”. It has proven difficult to get a firm theoretical grip on this behavior. It is not clear whether a simple, yet elusive, insight is missing or whether fundamental progress in quantum statistical mechanics will be necessary to understand what is going on. I will give examples of both approaches. Firstly, I will show that the strange metal behavior in certain strontium ruthenates seems to admit a `simple’ explanation. Secondly, I will show that fundamental constraints on transport can indeed to obtained from quantum statistical mechanics. I will argue that such results are relevant to strange metals, and allow us to develop robust intuition for transport beyond the quasiparticle paradigm.