Disordered non-interacting systems in sufficiently high dimensions have been predicted to display a non-Anderson disorder-driven transition that manifests itself in the critical behaviour of the density of states and other physical observables. Recently the critical properties of this transition have been extensively studied for the specific case of Weyl semimetals by means of numerical and renormalisation-group approaches. Despite this, the values of the critical exponents at such a transition in a Weyl semimetal are currently under debate. We present an independent calculation of the critical exponents using a two-loop renormalisation-group approach for Weyl fermions in $2-varepsilon$ dimensions and resolve controversies currently existing in the literature.
It is commonly believed that a non-interacting disordered electronic system can undergo only the Anderson metal-insulator transition. It has been suggested, however, that a broad class of systems can display disorder-driven transitions distinct from Anderson localisation that have manifestations in the disorder-averaged density of states, conductivity and other observables. Such transitions have received particular attention in the context of recently discovered 3D Weyl and Dirac materials but have also been predicted in cold-atom systems with long-range interactions, quantum kicked rotors and all sufficiently high-dimensional systems. Moreover, such systems exhibit unconventional behaviour of Lifshitz tails, energy-level statistics and ballistic-transport properties. Here we review recent progress and the status of results on non-Anderson disorder-driven transitions and related phenomena.
Systems with the power-law quasiparticle dispersion $epsilon_{bf k}propto k^alpha$ exhibit non-Anderson disorder-driven transitions in dimensions $d>2alpha$, as exemplified by Weyl semimetals, 1D and 2D arrays of ultracold ions with long-range interactions, quantum kicked rotors and semiconductor models in high dimensions. We study the wavefunction structure in such systems and demonstrate that at these transitions they exhibit fractal behaviour with an infinite set of multifractal exponents. The multifractality persists even when the wavefunction localisation is forbidden by symmetry or topology and occurs as a result of elastic scattering between all momentum states in the band on length scales shorter than the mean free path. We calculate explicitly the multifractal spectra in semiconductors and Weyl semimetals using one-loop and two-loop renormalisation-group approaches slightly above the marginal dimension $d=2alpha$.
We study the entanglement behavior of a random unitary circuit punctuated by projective measurements at the measurement-driven phase transition in one spatial dimension. We numerically study the logarithmic entanglement negativity of two disjoint intervals and find that it scales as a power of the cross-ratio. We investigate two systems: (1) Clifford circuits with projective measurements, and (2) Haar random local unitary circuit with projective measurements. Remarkably, we identify a power-law behavior of entanglement negativity at the critical point. Previous results of entanglement entropy and mutual information point to an emergent conformal invariance of the measurement-driven transition. Our result suggests that the critical behavior of the measurement-driven transition is distinct from the ground state behavior of any emph{unitary} conformal field theory.
The quantum phase transition between the three dimensional Dirac semimetal and the diffusive metal can be induced by increasing disorder. Taking the system of disordered $mathbb{Z}_2$ topological insulator as an important example, we compute the single particle density of states by the kernel polynomial method. We focus on three regions: the Dirac semimetal at the phase boundary between two topologically distinct phases, the tricritical point of the two topological insulator phases and the diffusive metal, and the diffusive metal lying at strong disorder. The density of states obeys a novel single parameter scaling, collapsing onto two branches of a universal scaling function, which correspond to the Dirac semimetal and the diffusive metal. The diverging length scale critical exponent $ u$ and the dynamical critical exponent $z$ are estimated, and found to differ significantly from those for the conventional Anderson transition. Critical behavior of experimentally observable quantities near and at the tricritical point is also discussed.
The effect of short-range disorder in nodal line semimetals is studied by numerically exact means. For arbitrary small disorder, a novel semimetallic phase is unveiled for which the momentum-space amplitude of the ground-state wave function is concentrated around the nodal line and follows a multifractal distribution. At a critical disorder strength, a semimetal to compressible metal transition occurs, coinciding with a multi- to single-fractality transition. The universality class of this critical point is characterized by the correlation length and dynamical exponents. At considerably higher disorder, an Anderson metal-insulator transition takes place. Our results show that the nature of the semimetallic phase in non-clean samples is fundamentally different from a clean nodal semimetal.