Electronic nematic phase transition in the presence of anisotropy

Abstract

We study the phase diagram of electronic nematic instability in the presence of xy anisotropy. While a second order transition cannot occur in this case, mean-field theory predicts that a first order transition occurs near van Hove filling and its phase boundary forms a wing structure, which we term a Griffiths wing, referring to his original work of He3-He4 mixtures. When crossing the wing, the anisotropy of the electronic system exhibits a discontinuous change, leading to a meta-nematic transition, i.e., the analog to a meta-magnetic transition in a magnetic system. The upper edge of the wing corresponds to a critical end line, which shows a non-monotonic temperature dependence as a function of the external anisotropy and vanishes at a quantum critical end point for a strong anisotropy. The mean-field phase diagram is, however, very sensitive to fluctuations of the nematic order parameter, yielding a topologically different phase diagram. The Griffiths wing is broken into two pieces. A tiny wing appears close to zero anisotropy and the other is realized for a strong anisotropy. Consequently three quantum critical end points are realized. We discuss that these results can be related to various materials including a cold atom system.