English

Collisionless Transport Close to a Fermionic Quantum Critical Point in Dirac Materials

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-10-01 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Quantum transport close to a critical point is a fundamental, but enigmatic problem due to fluctuations, persisting at all length scales. We report the scaling of optical conductivity (OC) in the \emph{collisionless} regime (ωkBT\hbar \omega \gg k_B T) in the vicinity of a relativistic quantum critical point, separating two-dimensional (d=2d=2) massless Dirac fermions from a fully gapped insulator or superconductor. Close to such critical point gapless fermionic and bosonic excitations are strongly coupled, leading to a \emph{universal} suppression of the inter-band OC as well as of the Drude peak (while maintaining its delta function profile) inside the critical regime, which we compute to the leading order in 1/Nf1/N_f- and ϵ\epsilon-expansions, where NfN_f counts fermion flavor number and ϵ=3d\epsilon=3-d. Correction to the OC at such a non-Gaussian critical point due to the long-range Coulomb interaction and generalizations of these scenarios to a strongly interacting three-dimensional Dirac or Weyl liquid are also presented, which can be tested numerically and possibly from non-pertubative gauge-gravity duality, for example.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.03495,
  title  = {Collisionless Transport Close to a Fermionic Quantum Critical Point in Dirac Materials},
  author = {Bitan Roy and Vladimir Juricic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.03495},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Published version in PRL: 5+epsilon Pages, 2 Figures (Supplementary Materials as Ancillary file: 4 pages)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:41:57.718Z