English

Duality and bosonization of (2+1)d Majorana fermions

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2017-05-31 v1

Abstract

We construct a dual bosonized description of a massless Majorana fermion in (2+1)d(2+1)d. In contrast to Dirac fermions, for which a bosonized description can be constructed using a flux attachment procedure, neutral Majorana fermions call for a different approach. We argue that the dual theory is an SO(N)1SO(N)_1 Chern-Simons gauge theory with a critical SO(N)SO(N) vector bosonic matter field (N3N \geq 3). The monopole of the SO(N)SO(N) gauge field is identified with the Majorana fermion. We provide evidence for the duality by establishing the correspondence of adjacent gapped phases and by a parton construction. We also propose a generalization of the duality to NfN_f flavors of Majorana fermions, and discuss possible resolutions of a caveat associated with an emergent global Z2Z_2 symmetry. Finally, we conjecture a dual description of an N=1\mathcal{N} = 1 supersymmetric fixed point in (2+1)d(2+1)d, which is realized by tuning a single flavor of Majorana fermions to an interacting (Gross-Neveu) critical point.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.05049,
  title  = {Duality and bosonization of (2+1)d Majorana fermions},
  author = {Max A. Metlitski and Ashvin Vishwanath and Cenke Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.05049},
  year   = {2017}
}

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11 pages