Sensitivity of the interlayer magnetoresistance of layered metals to intralayer anisotropies

Many of the most interesting and technologically important electronic materials discovered in the past two decades have both a layered crystal structure and strong interactions between electrons. Two fundamental questions about such layered metals concern the origin of intralayer anisotropies and the coherence of interlayer charge transport. We show that angle dependent magnetoresistance oscillations (AMROs) are sensitive to anisotropies around an intralayer Fermi surface and can hence be a complementary probe of such anisotropies to angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy. However, AMROs are not very sensitive to the coherence of the interlayer transport which has implications for recent AMRO experiments on an overdoped cuprate.