We investigate holographic fermions in general asymptotically scaling geometries with hyperscaling violation exponent $\theta$, which is a natural generalization of fermions in Lifshitz space-time. We prove that the retarded Green functions in this background satisfy the angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy sum rules by introducing a dynamical source on a UV brane for zero density fermionic systems. The big difference from the Lifshitz case is that the mass of probe fermions decoupled from the UV theory and thus has no longer been restricted by the unitarity bound. We also study finite density fermions at finite temperature, with dynamical exponent $z=2$. We find that the dispersion relation is linear, but the logarithm of the spectral function is not linearly related to the logarithm of $k_{\perp }=k-k_F$, independent of charge $q$ and $\theta$. Furthermore, we show that, with the increasing of charge, new branches of Fermi surfaces emerge and tend to gather together to form a shell-like structure when the charge reaches some critical value beyond which a wide band pattern appears in the momentum-charge plane. However, all sharp peaks will be smoothed out when $\theta$ increases, no matter how much large the charge is.

• Received 25 March 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.026018