English

Single particle excitations in disordered Weyl fluids

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2017-06-15 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We theoretically study the single particle Green function of a three dimensional disordered Weyl semimetal using a combination of techniques. These include analytic TT-matrix and renormalization group methods with complementary regimes of validity, and an exact numerical approach based on the kernel polynomial technique. We show that at any nonzero disorder, Weyl excitations are not ballistic: they instead have a nonzero linewidth that for weak short-range disorder arises from non-perturbative resonant impurity scattering. Perturbative approaches find a quantum critical point between a semimetal and a metal at a finite disorder strength, but this transition is avoided due to nonperturbative effects. At moderate disorder strength and intermediate energies the avoided quantum critical point renormalizes the scaling of single particle properties. In this regime we compute numerically the anomalous dimension of the fermion field and find η=0.13±0.04\eta= 0.13 \pm 0.04, which agrees well with a renormalization group analysis (η=0.125\eta= 0.125). Our predictions can be directly tested by ARPES and STM measurements in samples dominated by neutral impurities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.00783,
  title  = {Single particle excitations in disordered Weyl fluids},
  author = {J. H. Pixley and Yang-Zhi Chou and Pallab Goswami and David A. Huse and Rahul Nandkishore and Leo Radzihovsky and S. Das Sarma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.00783},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

11 pages 7 figures, replaced with published version, editors' suggestion

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:40:16.663Z