English

Generic "Unnecessary" Quantum Critical Points with Minimal Degrees of Freedom

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-01-15 v1

Abstract

We explore generic "unnecessary" quantum critical points with minimal degrees of freedom. These quantum critical points can be avoided with strong enough symmetry-allowed deformations of the Hamiltonian, but these deformations are irrelevant perturbations below certain threshold at the quantum critical point. These quantum critical points are hence unnecessary, but also unfine-tuned (generic). The previously known examples of such generic unnecessary quantum critical points involve at least eight Dirac fermions in both two and three spatial dimensions. In this work we seek for examples of generic unnecessary quantum critical points with minimal degrees of freedom. In particular, in three dimensional space, we identify two examples of such generic unnecessary quantum critical points. The first example occurs in a 3d3d interacting topological insulator, and it is described by twotwo (3+1)d(3+1)d massless Dirac fermions in the infrared limit; the second example occurs in a 3d3d topological superconductor, and it is formally described only oneone (3+1)d(3+1)d massless Dirac fermion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.08613,
  title  = {Generic "Unnecessary" Quantum Critical Points with Minimal Degrees of Freedom},
  author = {Chao-Ming Jian and Cenke Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.08613},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures. In order to be self-contained, this preprint contains a review of our previous work arXiv:1906.07191 in section IIA