We study quantum criticality of the magnetic field induced charge density wave (CDW) order in correlated spinless Dirac fermions on the $π$-flux square lattice at zero temperature as a prototypical example of the magnetic catalysis, by using the infinite density matrix renormalization group. It is found that the CDW order parameter $M(B)$ exhibits an anomalous magnetic field $(B)$ scaling behavior characteristic of the $(2+1)$-dimensional chiral Ising universality class near the quantum critical point, which leads to a strong enhancement of $M(B)$ compared with a mean field result. We also establish a global phase diagram in the interaction-magnetic field plane for the fermionic quantum criticality.
In this paper we study how dynamical chiral symmetry breaking is affected by nonzero chiral chemical potential in Dirac semimetals. To perform this study we applied lattice quantum Monte Carlo simulations of Dirac semimetals. Within lattice simulation we calculated the chiral condensate for various fermion masses, the chiral chemical potentials and effective coupling constants. For all parameters under consideration we have found that the chiral condensate is enhanced by chiral chemical potential. Thus our results confirms that in Dirac semimetals the chiral chemical potential plays a role of …
A range of quantum field theoretical phenomena driven by external magnetic fields and their applications in relativistic systems and quasirelativistic condensed matter ones, such as graphene and Dirac/Weyl semimetals, are reviewed. We start by introducing the underlying physics of the magnetic catalysis. The dimensional reduction of the low-energy dynamics of relativistic fermions in an external magnetic field is explained and its role in catalyzing spontaneous symmetry breaking is emphasized. The general theoretical consideration is supplemented by the analysis of the magnetic catalysis in qu…
We report on the first observation of magnetic catalysis at zero temperature in a fully nonperturbative simulation of the graphene effective field theory. Using lattice gauge theory, a nonperturbative analysis of the theory of strongly-interacting, massless, (2+1)-dimensional Dirac fermions in the presence of an external magnetic field is performed. We show that in the zero-temperature limit, a nonzero value for the chiral condensate is obtained which signals the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. This result implies a nonzero value for the dynamical mass of the Dirac quasiparticle. This…
We study the effect of an external magnetic field on the chiral phase transition in the theory of the strong interaction by means of a renormalization-group (RG) fixed-point analysis, relying on only one physical input parameter, the strong coupling at a given large momentum scale. To be specific, we consider the interplay of the RG flow of four-quark interactions and the running gauge coupling. Depending on the temperature and the strength of the magnetic field, the gauge coupling can drive the quark sector to criticality, resulting in chiral symmetry breaking. In accordance with lattice Mont…
Magnetic catalysis describes the enhancement of symmetry breaking quantum fluctuations in chirally symmetric quantum field theories by the coupling of fermionic degrees of freedom to a magnetic background configuration. We use the functional renormalization group to investigate this phenomenon for interacting Dirac fermions propagating in (2+1)-dimensional spacetime, described by the Gross-Neveu model. We identify pointlike operators up to quartic fermionic terms that can be generated in the renormalization group flow by the presence of an external magnetic field. We employ the beta function f…
We consider spontaneous symmetry breaking transitions of strongly interacting two-dimensional Dirac fermions minimally coupled to mass and emergent gauge field order parameters. Using a renormalization group analysis, we show that the presence of gauge fields leads to novel fermion induced quantum (multi-)criticality where the putative emergent Lorentz invariance is violated. We illustrate this with the example of translational symmetry breaking due to charge-density wave order on the honeycomb lattice. Finally, we identify that topological phase transitions are well described by this effectiv…
The fluctuations-driven continuous quantum criticality has sparked tremendous interest in condensed matter physics. It has been verified that the gapless fermions fluctuations can change the nature of phase transition at criticality. In this paper, we study the fermionic quantum criticality with enlarged Ising$\times$Ising fluctuations in honeycomb lattice materials. The Gross-Neveu-Yukawa theory for the multicriticality between the semimetallic phase and two ordered phases that break Ising symmetry is investigated by employing perturbative renormalization group approach. We first determine th…
We consider the role of spontaneous lattice symmetry breaking in strongly interacting two dimensional Dirac systems. The fermion induced quantum (multi-)criticality is described by Dirac fermions coupled to a dynamical order parameter that is composed of mass and emergent gauge fields. This is illustrated for the example of translational symmetry breaking due to charge-density wave order on the honeycomb lattice. Using a renormalization-group analysis we find that the putative emergent Lorentz invariance is violated. Finally, we identify that topological phase transitions are well described by…
We consider magnetic catalysis in a field-theoretic system of (3+1)-dimensional Dirac fermions with anisotropic kinetic term. By placing the system in a strong external magnetic field, we examine magnetically-induced fermion mass generation. When the coupling anisotropy is strong, in which case the fermions effectively localize on the plane, we find a significant enhancement of the induced mass gap compared to the isotropic four-dimensional case of quantum electrodynamics. As expected on purely dimensional grounds, the mass and critical temperature scale with the square root of the magnetic fi…
Nonequilibrium Dynamics of Dirac Quantum Criticality in Imaginary Time
Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics & Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所及凝聚态物理北京国家实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Physics and Materials Science, Guangzhou University（广州大学物理与材料科学学院）
Finite flux of the (time-reversal-symmetric) pseudo-magnetic field, which represents the effect of wrinkling of the graphene sheet for example, is shown to be a catalyst for spontaneous breaking of the time-reversal symmetry of Dirac fermions in two dimensions. Possible experimental consequences of this effect for graphene are discussed.
We analyze the scaling behavior at and near a quantum critical point separating a semimetallic from a superfluid phase. To this end we compute the renormalization group flow for a model of attractively interacting electrons with a linear dispersion around a single Dirac point. We study both ground state and finite temperature properties. In two dimensions, the electrons and the order parameter fluctuations exhibit power-law scaling with anomalous scaling dimensions. The quasi-particle weight and the Fermi velocity vanish at the quantum critical point. The order parameter correlation length tur…
We study superconductivity in a three-dimensional zero-density Dirac semimetal in proximity to a ferroelectric quantum critical point. We find that the interplay of criticality, inversion-symmetry breaking, and Dirac dispersion gives rise to a robust superconducting state at the charge-neutrality point, where no Fermi surface is present. Using Eliashberg theory, we show that the ferroelectric quantum critical point is unstable against the formation of a ferroelectric density wave (FDW), whose fluctuations, in turn, lead to a first-order superconducting transition. Surprisingly, long-range supe…
We investigate nematic quantum phase transitions in two different Dirac fermion models. The models feature twofold and fourfold, respectively, lattice rotational symmetries that are spontaneously broken in the ordered phase. Using negative-sign-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations and an $ε$-expansion renormalization group analysis, we show that both models exhibit continuous phase transitions. In contrast to generic Gross-Neveu dynamical mass generation, the quantum critical regime is characterized by large velocity anisotropies, with fixed-point values being approached very slowly. Hence bot…
Strong-coupling superconductivity near Gross-Neveu quantum criticality in Dirac systems
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）；Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院量子材料与技术研究所）
We study quantum criticality of spinless fermions on the quasi one dimensional $π$-flux square lattice in cylinder geometry, by using the infinite density matrix renormalization group and abelian bosonization. For a series of the cylinder circumferences $L_y=4n+2=2, 6, \cdots$ with the periodic boundary condition, there are quantum phase transitions from gapped Dirac fermion states to charge density wave (CDW) states. We find that the quantum phase transitions for such circumferences are continuous and belong to the (1+1)-dimensional Ising universality class. On the other hand, when $L_y=4n=4,…
Unifying Dirac Spin Liquids on Square and Shastry-Sutherland Lattices via Fermionic Deconfined Criticality
Universität Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（马德拉斯印度理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Two-dimensional semi-Dirac fermions are quasiparticles that disperse linearly in one direction and quadratically in the other. We investigate instabilities of semi-Dirac fermions towards charge, spin-density wave and superconducting orders, driven by short-range interactions. We analyze the critical behavior of the Yukawa theories for the different order parameters using Wilson momentum shell RG. We generalize to a large number $N_f$ of fermion flavors to achieve analytic control in 2+1 dimensions and calculate critical exponents at one-loop order, systematically including $1/N_f$ corrections.…
Massless 2+1D Dirac fermions arise in a variety of systems from graphene to the surfaces of topological insulators, where generating a mass is typically associated with breaking a symmetry. However, with strong interactions, a symmetric gapped phase can arise for multiples of eight Dirac fermions. A continuous quantum phase transition from the massless Dirac phase to this massive phase, which we term Symmetric Mass Generation (SMG), is necessarily beyond the Landau paradigm and is hard to describe even at the conceptual level. Nevertheless, such transition has been consistently observed in sev…
The quantum phase transition to a $\mathbb{Z}_3$-ordered Kekulé valence bond solid in two-dimensional Dirac semimetals is governed by a fermion-induced quantum critical point, which renders the putatively discontinuous transition continuous. We study the resulting universal critical behavior in terms of a functional RG approach, which gives access to the scaling behavior on the symmetry-broken side of the phase transition, for general dimension and number of Dirac fermions. In particular, we investigate the emergence of the fermion-induced quantum critical point for space-time dimensions $2<d<…
Interaction driven symmetry breaking in a metallic (doped) Dirac system can manifest in the spontaneous gap generation at the nodal point buried below the Fermi level. Across this transition linear conductivity remains finite making its direct observation difficult in linear transport. We propose the nonlinear Hall effect as a direct probe of this transition when inversion symmetry is broken. Specifically, for a two-dimensional Dirac material with a tilted low-energy dispersion, we first predict a transformation of the characteristic inter-band resonance peak into a non-Lorentzian form in the …
Inspired by our recent works[1, 2] of SU(2) and SU(4) Dirac fermions subjected to plaquette interactions on square lattice, here we extend the large-scale quantum Monte Carlo investigations to the phase digram of correlated Dirac fermions with SU(6) and SU(8) symmetries subjected to the plaquette interaction on the same lattice. From SU(2) to SU(8), the rich phase diagram exhibits a plethora of emerging quantum phases such as the Dirac semimetal, the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator, valence bond solid (VBS) and the Dirac spin liquid and phase transitions including the Gross-Neveu chiral trans…
We investigate the ordering instability of interacting (and for simplicity, spinless) fermions on graphene's honeycomb lattice by numerically computing the Hartree self-consistent solution for the charge-density-wave order parameter in presence of both uniform and non-uniform magnetic fields. For a uniform field the overall behavior of the order parameter is found to be in accord with the continuum theory. In the inhomogeneous case, the spatial profile of the order parameter resembles qualitatively the form of the magnetic field itself, at least when the interaction is not overly strong. We fi…
One of the most important developments in condensed matter physics in recent years has been the discovery and characterization of graphene. A two-dimensional layer of Carbon arranged in a hexagonal lattice, graphene exhibits many interesting electronic properties, most notably that the low energy excitations behave as massless Dirac fermions. These excitations interact strongly via the Coulomb interaction and thus non-perturbative methods are necessary. Using methods borrowed from lattice QCD, we study the graphene effective theory in the presence of an external magnetic field. Graphene, along…
Quantum criticality, a manifestation of emergent scale invariance in electron wavefunctions arises from intricate many-body quantum entanglement. One of the natural venues for the criticality is clean undoped Dirac semimetals, known as a marginally-renormalized critical phase. The ground state is only slightly modified from the Slater-type product wavefunction because the scatterings from weak disorder and Coulomb interactions are suppressed. Here, using the renormalization group (RG) analysis, we show that a novel class of quantum criticality appears in Dirac semimetals when the disorder stre…
Quantum spin liquids (QSL) are exotic phases of matter that host fractionalized excitations. It is difficult for local probes to characterize QSL, whereas quantum entanglement can serve as a powerful diagnostic tool due to its non-locality. The kagome antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model is one of the most studied and experimentally relevant models for QSL, but its solution remains under debate. Here, we perform a numerical Aharonov-Bohm experiment on this model and uncover universal features of the entanglement entropy. By means of the density-matrix renormalization group, we reveal the entangl…
We investigate a semimetal-superconductor phase transition of two-dimensional Dirac electrons at zero temperature by large-scale and essentially unbiased quantum Monte Carlo simulations for the half-filled attractive Hubbard model on the triangular lattice, in the presence of alternating magnetic $π$-flux, that is introduced to construct two Dirac points in the one-particle bands at the Fermi level. This phase transition is expected to describe quantum criticality of the chiral XY class in the framework of the Gross-Neveu model, where, in the ordered phase, the $U(1)$ symmetry is spontaneously…
We study the effects of an external magnetic field on thensuperconducting phase diagram of a quasi-two-dimensional system of Dirac electrons at an arbitrary temperature. At zero temperature, there is a quantum phase transition connecting a normal and a superconducting phase, occurring at a critical line that corresponds to a magnetic field dependent critical coupling parameter, which should be observed in planar materials containing Dirac electrons, such as $Cu_xTiSe_2$. Moreover, the superconducting gap is obtained as a function of temperature, magnetic field and coupling parameter ($λ_{\rm R…
The metal-insulator transition has been a subject of intense research since Nevil Mott has first proposed that the metallic behavior of interacting electrons could turn to the insulating one as electron correlations increase. Here, we consider electrons with massless Dirac-like dispersion in two spatial dimensions, described by the Hubbard models on two geometrically different lattices, and perform numerically exact calculations on unprecedentedly large systems that, combined with a careful finite size scaling analysis, allow us to explore the quantum critical behavior in the vicinity of the i…
Progress in the understanding of quantum critical properties of itinerant electrons has been hindered by the lack of effective models which are amenable to controlled analytical and numerically exact calculations. Here we establish that the disorder driven semimetal to metal quantum phase transition of three dimensional massless Dirac fermions could serve as a paradigmatic toy model for studying itinerant quantum criticality, which is solved in this work by exact numerical and approximate field theoretic calculations. As a result, we establish the robust existence of a non-Gaussian universalit…
We perform large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations of SLAC fermions on a two-dimensional square lattice at half filling with a single Dirac cone with $N=2$ spinor components and repulsive on-site interactions. Despite the presence of a sign problem, we accurately identify the critical interaction strength $U_c = 7.28 \pm 0.02$ in units of the hopping amplitude, for a continuous quantum phase transition between a paramagnetic Dirac semimetal and a ferromagnetic insulator. Using finite-size scaling, we extract the critical exponents for the corresponding $N=2$ chiral Ising Gross-Neveu univer…
We numerically study the effect of short ranged potential disorder on massless noninteracting three-dimensional Dirac and Weyl fermions, with a focus on the question of the proposed quantum critical point separating the semimetal and diffusive metal phases. We determine the properties of the eigenstates of the disordered Dirac Hamiltonian ($H$) and exactly calculate the density of states (DOS) near zero energy, using a combination of Lanczos on $H^2$ and the kernel polynomial method on $H$. We establish the existence of two distinct types of low energy eigenstates contributing to the disordere…
Four-component massive and massless Dirac fermions in the presence of long range Coulomb interaction and chemical potential disorder exhibit striking fermionic quantum criticality. For an odd number of flavors of Dirac fermions, the sign of the Dirac mass distinguishes the topological and the trivial band insulator phases, and the gapless semi-metallic phase corresponds to the quantum critical point that separates the two. Up to a critical strength of disorder, the semi-metallic phase remains stable, and the universality class of the direct phase transition between two insulating phases is unc…
Motivated by the physics of spin-orbital liquids, we study a model of interacting Dirac fermions on a bilayer honeycomb lattice at half filling, featuring an explicit global SO(3)$\times$U(1) symmetry. Using large-scale auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations, we locate two zero-temperature phase transitions as function of increasing interaction strength. First, we observe a continuous transition from the weakly-interacting semimetal to a different semimetallic phase in which the SO(3) symmetry is spontaneously broken and where two out of three Dirac cones acquire a mass gap. The…
We discuss the simulation of the low-energy effective field theory (EFT) for graphene in the presence of an external magnetic field. Our fully nonperturbative calculation uses methods of lattice gauge theory to study the theory using a hybrid Monte Carlo approach. We investigate the phenomenon of magnetic catalysis in the context of graphene by studying the chiral condensate which is the order parameter characterizing the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry. In the EFT, the symmetry breaking pattern is given by $U(4) \to U(2) \times U(2)$. We also comment on the difficulty, in this lattice…
At sufficiently low temperatures, interacting electron systems tend to develop orders. Exceptions are quantum critical point (QCP) and quantum spin liquid (QSL), where fluctuations prevent the highly entangled quantum matter to an ordered state down to the lowest temperature. While the ramification of these states may have appeared in high-temperature superconductors, ultra-cold atoms, frustrated magnets and quantum Moiré materials, their unbiased presence remain elusive in microscopic two-dimensional lattice models. Here, we show by means of large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations of corr…
Finite-temperature quantum Monte Carlo study of Dirac quantum criticality: Algorithmic advances and comprehensive analysis
Institute of Modern Physics, Northwest University（西北大学现代物理研究所）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）；School of Physics, Northwest University（西北大学物理学院）；Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Theoretical Physics Frontiers（陕西理论物理前沿重点实验室）；Fundamental Discipline Research Center for Quantum Science and Technology of Shaanxi Province（陕西省量子科学与技术基础学科研究中心）
We present a theory describing the superconducting (SC) interaction of Dirac electrons in a quasi-two-dimensional system consisting of a stack of N planes. The occurrence of a SC phase is investigated both at T=0 and T\neq 0, in the case of a local interaction, when the theory must be renormalized and also in the situation where a natural physical cutoff is present in the system. In both cases, at T=0, we find a quantum phase transition connecting the normal and SC phases at a certain critical coupling. The phase structure is shown to be robust against quantum fluctuations. The SC gap is deter…
Quantum critical points separating weak ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases trigger many novel phenomena. Dynamical spin fluctuations not only suppress the long-range order, but can also lead to unusual transport and even superconductivity. Combining quantum criticality with topological electronic properties presents a rare and unique opportunity. Here, by means of ab initio calculations and magnetic, thermal, and transport measurements, we show that the orthorhombic CoTe$_2$ is close to ferromagnetism, which appears suppressed by spin fluctuations. Calculations and transport measurements re…
Quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions is an effective gauge theory for the so called algebraic quantum liquids. A new type of such a liquid, the algebraic charge liquid, has been proposed recently in the context of deconfined quantum critical points [R. K. Kaul {\it et al.}, Nature Physics {\bf 4}, 28 (2008)]. In this context, we show by using the renormalization group in $d=4-ε$ spacetime dimensions, that a deconfined quantum critical point occurs in a SU(2) system provided the number of Dirac fermion species $N_f\geq 4$. The calculations are done in a representation where the Dirac fermi…
We analyze emergent quantum multi-criticality for strongly interacting, massless Dirac fermions in two spatial dimensions ($d=2$) within the framework of Gross-Neveu-Yukawa models, by considering the competing order parameters that give rise to fully gapped (insulating or superconducting) ground states. We focus only on those competing orders, which can be rotated into each other by generators of an exact or emergent chiral symmetry of massless Dirac fermions, and break $O(S_1)$ and $O(S_2)$ symmetries in the ordered phase. Performing a renormalization group analysis by using the $ε=(3-d)$ exp…
We establish a scenario where fluctuations of new degrees of freedom at a quantum phase transition change the nature of a transition beyond the standard Landau-Ginzburg paradigm. To this end we study the quantum phase transition of gapless Dirac fermions coupled to a $\mathbb{Z}_3$ symmetric order parameter within a Gross-Neveu-Yukawa model in 2+1 dimensions, appropriate for the Kekulé transition in honeycomb lattice materials. For this model the standard Landau-Ginzburg approach suggests a first order transition due to the symmetry-allowed cubic terms in the action. At zero temperature, howev…
Three-dimensional Weyl and Dirac semimetals can support a chiral-symmetry-breaking, fully gapped, charge-density-wave order even for sufficiently weak repulsive electron-electron interactions, when placed in strong magnetic fields. In the former systems, due to the natural momentum space separation of Weyl nodes the ordered phase lacks the translational symmetry and represents an axionic phase of matter, while that in a Dirac semimetal (neglecting the Zeeman coupling) is only a trivial insulator. We present the scaling of this spectral gap for a wide range of subcritical (weak) interactions as…
William & Mary（威廉与玛丽学院）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
We numerically study weak, random, spatial velocity modulation ["quenched gravitational disorder" (QGD)] in two-dimensional massless Dirac materials. QGD couples to the spatial components of the stress tensor; the gauge-invariant disorder strength is encoded in the quenched curvature. Although expected to produce negligible effects, wave interference due to QGD transforms all but the lowest-energy states into a quantum-critical "stack" with universal, energy-independent spatial fluctuations. We study five variants of velocity disorder, incorporating three different local deformations of the Di…
We describe a generic mechanism by which a system of Dirac fermions in thermal equilibrium acquires electric charge in an external magnetic field. To this end the fermions should have an additional quantum number, isospin or color, and should be subject to a second magnetic field, which distinguishes the isospin/color, as well as to a corresponding isospin chemical potential. The role of the latter can be also played by a nontrivial holonomy (Polyakov loop) along the Euclidean time direction. The charge is accumulated since the degeneracies of occupied lowest Landau levels for particles of pos…
