English

Optical conductivity of a Dirac-Fermi liquid

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2021-07-28 v3 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

A Dirac-Fermi liquid (DFL)--a doped system with Dirac spectrum--is an important example of a non-Galilean-invariant Fermi liquid (FL). Real-life realizations of a DFL include, e.g., doped graphene, surface states of three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators, and 3D Dirac/Weyl metals. We study the optical conductivity of a DFL arising from intraband electron-electron scattering. It is shown that the effective current relaxation rate behaves as 1/τJ(ω2+4π2T2)(3ω2+8π2T2)1/\tau_{J}\propto \left(\omega^2+4\pi^2 T^2\right)\left(3\omega^2+8\pi^2 T^2\right) for max{ω,T}μ\max\{\omega, T\}\ll \mu, where μ\mu is the chemical potential, with an additional logarithmic factor in two dimensions. In graphene, the quartic form of 1/τJ1/\tau_{J} competes with a small FL-like term, ω2+4π2T2\propto\omega^2+4\pi^2 T^2, due to trigonal warping of the Fermi surface. We also calculated the dynamical charge susceptibility, χc(q,ω)\chi_\mathrm{c}({\bf q},\omega), outside the particle-hole continua and to one-loop order in the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction. For a 2D DFL, the imaginary part of χc(q,ω)\chi_\mathrm{c}({\bf q},\omega) scales as q2ωlnωq^2\omega\ln|\omega| and q4/ω3q^4/\omega^3 for frequencies larger and smaller than the plasmon frequency at given qq, respectively. The small-qq limit of Imχc(q,ω)\mathrm{Im} \chi_\mathrm{c}({\bf q},\omega) reproduces our result for the conductivity via the Einstein relation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.02616,
  title  = {Optical conductivity of a Dirac-Fermi liquid},
  author = {Prachi Sharma and Alessandro Principi and Dmitrii L. Maslov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.02616},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

28 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:50:58.494Z