We describe the evolution of low-temperature thermopower across Fermi-volume-changing quantum phase transitions in Kondo lattice models without translational symmetry breaking. This transition moves from a heavy Fermi liquid with a conventional Luttinger-volume large Fermi surface to a “FL*” state, characterized by a small Fermi surface and a spin liquid with fractionalized excitations. The onset of the large Fermi surface phase is driven by the condensation of a Higgs field that carries a unit gauge charge under an emergent U(1) gauge field. We consider the case with spatially random Kondo exchange, as this leads to strange metal behavior in electrical transport. We find a large asymmetric thermopower in a “skewed” marginal Fermi liquid, with similarities to the skewed non-Fermi liquid of Georges and Mravlje [Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 043132 (2021)]. Our findings are consistent with recent observations in heavy fermion compounds (Z.-Y. Cao et al., arXiv:2408.13604) and describe an enhancement of thermopower on the large Fermi surface side as well as a nonmonotonic behavior on the small Fermi surface side. Our results also apply to single-band Hubbard models and the pseudogap transition in the cuprates. In the ancilla framework, single-band models exhibit an inverted Kondo lattice transition: the small Fermi surface pseudogap state corresponds to the condensed Higgs state. This inversion results in an enhancement of thermopower on the pseudogap side in our theory, consistent with observations in the cuprates [C. Collignon et al., Phys. Rev. B 103, 155102 (2021)); A. Gourgout et al., Phys. Rev. X 12, 011037 (2022)]. We argue that these observations support a non-symmetry-breaking Fermi-volume-changing transition as the underlying description of the onset of the pseudogap in the cuprates.

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• Critical phenomena
• Quantum phase transitions
• Thermopower
• Cuprates
• Heavy-fermion systems