No Arabic abstract
The strong long-range Coulomb interaction between massless Dirac fermions in graphene can drive a semimetal-insulator transition. We show that this transition is strongly suppressed when the Coulomb interaction is screened by such effects as disorder, thermal fluctuation, doping, and finite volume. It is completely suppressed once the screening factor $mu$ is beyond a threshold $mu_{c}$ even for infinitely strong coupling. However, such transition is still possible if there is an additional strong contact four-fermion interaction. The differences between screened and contact interactions are also discussed.
We develop a theory of the excitonic phase recently proposed as the zero-field insulating state observed near charge neutrality in monolayer WTe$_2$. Using a Hartree-Fock approximation, we numerically identify two distinct gapped excitonic phases: a spin density wave state for weak but non-zero interaction strength $U_0$, and spin spiral order at larger $U_0$, separated by a narrow window of trivial insulator. We introduce a simplified model capturing essential features of the WTe$_2$ band structure, in which the two phases may be viewed as distinct valley ferromagnetic orders. We link the competition between the two phases to the orbital structure of the electronic wavefunctions at the Fermi surface and hence its proximity to the underlying gapped Dirac point in WTe$_2$. We briefly discuss collective modes of the two excitonic states, and comment on implications for experiments.
We study the quantum criticality of the phase transition between the Dirac semimetal and the excitonic insulator in two dimensions. Even though the system has a semimetallic ground state, there are observable effects of excitonic pairing at finite temperatures and/or finite energies, provided that the system is in proximity to the excitonic insulating transition. To determine the quantum critical behavior, we consider three potentially important interactions, including the Yukawa coupling between Dirac fermions and the excitonic order parameter fluctuation, the long-range Coulomb interaction, and the disorder scattering. We employ the renormalization group technique to study how these interactions affect quantum criticality and also how they influence each other. We first investigate the Yukawa coupling in the clean limit, and show that it gives rise to typical non-Fermi liquid behavior. Adding random scalar potential to the system always turns such a non-Fermi liquid into a compressible diffusive metal. In comparison, the non-Fermi liquid behavior is further enhanced by random vector potential, but is nearly unaffected by random mass. Incorporating the Coulomb interaction may change the results qualitatively. In particular, the non-Fermi liquid state is protected by the Coulomb interaction for weak random scalar potential, and it becomes a diffusive metal only when random scalar potential becomes sufficiently strong. When random vector potential or random mass coexists with Yukawa coupling and Coulomb interaction, the system is a stable non-Fermi liquid state, with fermion velocities flowing to constants in the former case and being singularly renormalized in the latter case. These quantum critical phenomena can be probed by measuring observable quantities.
Dirac electrons in graphene in the presence of Coulomb interactions of strength $beta$ have been shown to display power law behavior with $beta$ dependent exponents in certain correlation functions, which we call the mass susceptibilities of the system. In this work, we first discuss how this phenomenon is intimately related to the excitonic insulator transition, showing the explicit relation between the gap equation and response function approaches to this problem. We then provide a general computation of these mass susceptibilities in the ladder approximation, and present an analytical computation of the static exponent within a simplified kernel model, obtaining $eta_0 =sqrt{1-beta/beta_c}$ . Finally we emphasize that the behavior of these susceptibilities provides new experimental signatures of interactions, such as power law Kohn anomalies in the dispersion of several phonons, which could potentially be used as a measurement of $beta$.
The recently observed superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene emerges from insulating states believed to arise from electronic correlations. While there have been many proposals to explain the insulating behaviour, the commensurability at which these states appear suggests that they are Mott insulators. Here we focus on the insulating states with $pm 2$ electrons or holes with respect to the charge neutrality point. We show that the theoretical expectations for the Mott insulating states are not compatible with the experimentally observed dependence on temperature and magnetic field if, as frequently assumed, only the correlations between electrons on the same site are included. We argue that the inclusion of non-local (inter-site) correlations in the treatment of the Hubbard model can bring the predictions for the magnetic and temperature dependencies of the Mott transition to an agreement with experiments and have consequences for the critical interactions, the size of the gap, and possible pseudogap physics. The importance of the inter-site correlations to explain the experimental observations indicates that the observed insulating gap is not the one between the Hubbard bands and that antiferromagnetic-like correlations play a key role in the Mott transition.
We consider magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) at filling $ u=+3$, where experiments have observed a robust quantized anomalous Hall effect. This has been attributed to the formation of a valley- and spin-polarized Chern insulating ground state that spontaneously breaks time-reversal symmetry, and is stabilized by a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) substrate. We identify three different types of domain wall, and study their properties and energetic selection mechanisms via theoretical arguments and Hartree-Fock calculations adapted to deal with inhomogeneous moire systems. We comment on the implications of these results for transport and scanning probe experiments.