Through resistivity measurements of an organic crystal hosting massless Dirac fermions with a charge-ordering instability, we reveal the effect of interactions among Dirac fermions on the charge transport. A low-temperature resistivity upturn appears robustly irrespectively of pressure and is enhanced while approaching the critical pressure of charge ordering, indicating that the insulating behavior originates from short-range Coulomb interactions. Observation of apparently vanishing gap in the charge-ordered phase accords with the theoretical prediction of the non-topological edge states.
We study excitonic effects in two-dimensional massless Dirac fermions with Coulomb interactions by solving the ladder approximation to the Bethe-Salpeter equation. It is found that the general 4-leg vertex has a power law behavior with the exponent going from real to complex as the coupling constant is increased. This change of behavior is manifested in the antisymmetric response, which displays power law behavior at small wavevectors reminiscent of a critical state, and a change in this power law from real to complex that is accompanied by poles in the response function for finite size systems, suggesting a phase transition for strong enough interactions. The density-density response is also calculated, for which no critical behavior is found. We demonstrate that exciton correlations enhance the cusp in the irreducible polarizability at $2k_F$, leading to a strong increase in the amplitude of Friedel oscillations around a charged impurity.
Coulomb drag between two unhybridized graphene sheets separated by a dielectric spacer has recently attracted considerable theoretical interest. We first review, for the sake of completeness, the main analytical results which have been obtained by other authors. We then illustrate pedagogically the minimal theory of Coulomb drag between two spatially-separated two-dimensional systems of massless Dirac fermions which are both away from the charge-neutrality point. This relies on second-order perturbation theory in the screened interlayer interaction and on Boltzmann transport theory. In this theoretical framework and in the low-temperature limit, we demonstrate that, to leading (i.e. quadratic) order in temperature, the drag transresistivity is completely insensitive to the precise intralayer momentum-relaxation mechanism (i.e. to the functional dependence of the scattering time on energy). We also provide analytical results for the low-temperature drag transresistivity for both cases of thick and thin spacers and for arbitrary values of the dielectric constants of the media surrounding the two Dirac-fermion layers. Finally, we present numerical results for the low-temperature drag transresistivity in the case in which one of the media surrounding the Dirac-fermion layers has a frequency-dependent dielectric constant. We conclude by suggesting an experiment that can potentially allow for the observation of departures from the canonical Fermi-liquid quadratic-in-temperature behavior of the transresistivity.
High precision measurements of the Hall effect have been carried out for archetypal heavy fermion compound - CeAl3 in a wide range of temperatures 1.8-300K. For the first time a complex activated behavior of the Hall coefficient in CeAl3 with activation energies Ea1/kB=220K and Ea2/kB=3.3K has been observed in the temperature intervals 50-300K and 10-35K respectively. At temperatures below the maximum of the Hall effect T<Tmax=10K an asymptotic dependence RH(T)=exp(-Ea3/kBT) was found in CeAl3 with the value Ea3/kB=0.38K estimated from the experimental data. The temperature evolution of microscopic parameters (effective mass and localization radius) evaluated for the many-body states (heavy fermions) is discussed in terms of an electron-polaron states formation in vicinity of Ce-sites in the CeAl3 matrix.
Ab-initio relativistic dynamical mean-field theory is applied to resolve the long-standing controversy between theory and experiment in the simple face-centered cubic phase of plutonium called delta-Pu. In agreement with experiment, neither static nor dynamical magnetic moments are predicted. In addition, the quasiparticle density of states reproduces not only the peak close to the Fermi level, which explains the large coefficient of electronic specific heat, but also main 5f features observed in photoelectron spectroscopy.
While many physical properties of graphene can be understood qualitatively on the basis of bare Dirac bands, there is specific evidence that electron-electron (EE) and electron-phonon (EP) interactions can also play an important role. We discuss strategies for extracting separate images of the EE and EP interactions as they present themselves in the electron spectral density and related self-energies. While for momentum, $k$, equal to its Fermi value, $k_F$, a composite structure is obtained which can be difficult to separate into its two constituent parts, at smaller values of $k$ the spectral function shows distinct incoherent sidebands on the left and right of the main quasiparticle line. These image respectively the EE and EP interactions, each being most prominent in its own energy window. We employ a maximum entropy inversion technique on the self energy to reveal the electron-phonon spectral density separate from the excitation spectrum due to coulomb correlations. Our calculations show that this technique can provide important new insights into inelastic scattering processes in graphene.