Incoherent transport across the strange-metal regime of overdoped cuprates

Strange metals possess highly unconventional electrical properties, such as a linear-in-temperature resistivity 1 – 6 , an inverse Hall angle that varies as temperature squared 7 – 9 and a linear-in-field magnetoresistance 10 – 13 . Identifying the origin of these collective anomalies has proved fundamentally challenging, even in materials such as the hole-doped cuprates that possess a simple bandstructure. The prevailing consensus is that strange metallicity in the cuprates is tied to a quantum critical point at a doping p * inside the superconducting dome 14 , 15 . Here we study the high-field in-plane magnetoresistance of two superconducting cuprate families at doping levels beyond p *. At all dopings, the magnetoresistance exhibits quadrature scaling and becomes linear at high values of the ratio of the field and the temperature, indicating that the strange-metal regime extends well beyond p *. Moreover, the magnitude of the magnetoresistance is found to be much larger than predicted by conventional theory and is insensitive to both impurity scattering and magnetic field orientation. These observations, coupled with analysis of the zero-field and Hall resistivities, suggest that despite having a single band, the cuprate strange-metal region hosts two charge sectors, one containing coherent quasiparticles, the other scale-invariant ‘Planckian’ dissipators. Measurements of high-field magnetotransport in overdoped cuprates indicate that the strange-metal regime exists beyond the critical doping, and that it has both coherent and incoherent contributions.