Anisotropic tunneling and resistivity in high-temperature superconductors

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Abstract
We discuss the tunneling characteristics expected within an anisotropic metal using the marginal-Fermi-liquid phenomenology. Although there is no modification of the density of states, we show it to be natural that tunneling matrix elements lead to an anisotropic conductance, which is typically ssV-shaped for c-axis tunneling, and almost flat for in-plane tunneling. We suggest that this behavior is directly related to the observatoin of resistive upturns in the c-axis conductivity of disordered samples.