Temperature scaling of Fermi arcs in the normal state of the underdoped cuprate superconductors

Recent angle resolved photoemission experiments by Kanigel et al., [Nature Physics 2 (2006) 447] show that the low energy electronic excitations in the normal state of underdoped cuprate superconductors exist on open Fermi arcs which shrink upon cooling, and appear to extrapolate to nodal points at zero temperature. We show that this non-Fermi liquid phenomenon could result from the underdoped normal state lying in the quantum critical regime of a superconductor-insulator transition, and present computational results for the electron spectral function which are in reasonable agreement with the experimental results. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.