2 M ay 1 99 8 Instability of a Landau Fermi liquid as the Mott insulator is approached

We examine a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with a Fermi surface which touches the Umklapp surface first at the 4 points (±π/2, ±π/2) as the electron density is increased. Umklapp processes at the 4 patches near (±π/2, ±π/2) lead the renor-malization group equations to scale to strong coupling resembling the behavior of a 2-leg ladder at half-filling. The incompressible character of the fixed point causes a breakdown of Landau theory at these patches. A further increase in density spreads the incompress-ible regions so that the open Fermi surface shrinks to 4 disconnected segments. This non-Landau state, in which parts of the Fermi surface are truncated to form an insulating spin liquid, has many features in common with phenomenological models recently proposed for the cuprate superconductors.