No Arabic abstract
In planar tilted Dirac cone systems, the tilt parameter can be made space-dependent by either a perpendicular displacement field, or by chemical substitution in certain systems. We show that the symmetric partial derivative of the tilt parameter generates non-Abelian synthetic gauge fields in these systems. The small velocity limit of these gauge forces corresponds to Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings. At the classical level, the same symmetric spatial derivatives of tilt contribute to conservative, Lorentz-type and friction-like forces. The velocity dependent forces are odd with respect to tilt and therefore have opposite signs in the two valleys when the system is inversion symmetric. Furthermore, toggling the chemical potential between the valence and conduction bands reverses the sign of the all these classical forces, which indicates these forces couple to the electric charge of the carriers. As such, these forces are natural extensions of the electric and magnetic forces in the particular geometry of the tilted Dirac cone systems.
Electrons in low-temperature solids are governed by the non-relativistic Schr$ddot{o}$dinger equation, since the electron velocities are much slower than the speed of light. Remarkably, the low-energy quasi-particles given by electrons in various materials can behave as relativistic Dirac/Weyl fermions that obey the relativistic Dirac/Weyl equation. We refer to these materials as Dirac/Weyl materials, which provide a tunable platform to test relativistic quantum phenomena in table-top experiments. More interestingly, different types of physical fields in these Weyl/Dirac materials, such as magnetic fluctuations, lattice vibration, strain, and material inhomogeneity, can couple to the relativistic quasi-particles in a similar way as the $U(1)$ gauge coupling. As these fields do not have gauge-invariant dynamics in general, we refer to them as pseudo-gauge fields. In this chapter, we overview the concept and physical consequences of pseudo-gauge fields in Weyl/Dirac materials. In particular, we will demonstrate that pseudo-gauge fields can provide a unified understanding of a variety of physical phenomena, including chiral zero modes inside a magnetic vortex core of magnetic Weyl semimetals, a giant current response at magnetic resonance in magnetic topological insulators, and piezo-electromagnetic response in time-reversal invariant systems. These phenomena are deeply related to various concepts in high-energy physics, such as chiral anomaly and axion electrodynamics.
In this work we present an optical lattice setup to realize a full Dirac Hamiltonian in 2+1 dimensions. We show how all possible external potentials coupled to the Dirac field can arise from perturbations of the existing couplings of the honeycomb lattice model, without the need of additional laser fields. This greatly simplifies the proposed implementations, requiring only spatial modulations of the intensity of the laser beams. We finally suggest several experiments to observe the properties of the Dirac field in the setup.
Dirac fermions in graphene can be subjected to non-abelian gauge fields by implementing certain modulations of the carbon site potentials. Artificial graphene, engineered with a lattice of CO molecules on top of the surface of Cu, offers an ideal arena to study their effects. In this work, we show by symmetry arguments how the underlying CO lattice must be deformed to obtain these gauge fields, and estimate their strength. We also discuss the fundamental differences between abelian and non-abelian gauge fields from the Dirac electrons point of view, and show how a constant (non-abelian) magnetic field gives rise to either a Landau level spectrum or a quadratic band touching, depending on the gauge field that realizes it (a known feature of non-abelian gauge fields known as the Wu-Yang ambiguity). We finally present the characteristic signatures of these effects in the site-resolved density of states that can be directly measured in the current molecular graphene experiment, and discuss prospects to realize the interaction induced broken symmetry states of a quadratic touching in this system.
We analyze the entanglement between two modes of a free Dirac field as seen by two relatively accelerated parties. The entanglement is degraded by the Unruh effect and asymptotically reaches a non-vanishing minimum value in the infinite acceleration limit. This means that the state always remains entangled to a degree and can be used in quantum information tasks, such as teleportation, between parties in relative uniform acceleration. We analyze our results from the point of view afforded by the phenomenon of entanglement sharing and in terms of recent results in the area of multi-qubit complementarity.
Inspired by the discovery of quantum hall effect and topological insulator, topological properties of classical waves start to draw worldwide attention. Topological non-trivial bands characterized by non-zero Chern numbers are realized with external magnetic field induced time reversal symmetry breaking or dynamic modulation. Due to the absence of Faraday-like effect, the breaking of time reversal symmetry in an acoustic system is commonly realized with moving background fluids, and hence drastically increases the engineering complexity. Here we show that we can realize effective inversion symmetry breaking and effective gauge field in a reduced two-dimensional system by structurally engineering interlayer couplings, achieving an acoustic analog of the topological Haldane model. We then find and demonstrate unidirectional backscattering immune edge states. We show that the synthetic gauge field is closely related to the Weyl points in the three-dimensional band structure.