Transverse Gauge Interactions and the Vanquished Fermi Liquid

The interaction between a Fermi liquid and transverse gauge bosons is considered within the framework of the renormalization group. It is shown from an expansion in $\epsilon =3-d$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension, that a nontrivial fixed point emerges for dimensions less than three, and that this fixed point signifies a critical Fermi system different from the conventional Landau-Fermi liquid. The dimension $d=3\mathrm{}$ is the upper critical dimension where the correlation functions contain logarithmic corrections; for $d>\mathrm{}3\mathrm{}$, the system behaves like a Landau-Fermi liquid. Some of the consequences of this breakdown of Fermi liquid are discussed.