Interplay between tilt, disorder, and Coulomb interaction in type-I Dirac fermions

Abstract

We investigate the mutual influence of tilt, disorder, and Coulomb interaction in a type-I Dirac semimetal (DSM) with $x$-direction tilt by performing a renormalization group analysis. The interplay between disorder and ordinary tilt generates an effective tilt along the $x$-direction, which is the physically observable one. There exist two types of disorder which increase the effective tilt and drive a phase transition from the DSM phase to the diffusive metal phase. The diffusive phase transition stops the increase of the effective tilt and the surface of the original Dirac cone in the diffusive metal phase is just slightly tilted. Surprisingly, the Dirac point is replaced by a bulk nodal arc in the diffusive metal phase. The Coulomb interaction suppresses the diffusive phase transition and therefore is harmful to the formation of bulk nodal arc. In contrast, there also exists other two types of disorder which reduce the effective tilt and induce no phase transition. For these two types of disorder, the Coulomb interaction enhances their low-energy relevances. Coexistence of Coulomb interaction with any of them leads to a stable infrared fixed point where the coupling strengths for two kinds of interaction are identical and the effective tilt vanishes. The original tilted Dirac semimetal now reacts like an untilted and interaction-free Dirac semimetal. Our results show that interplay between tilt, disorder, and Coulomb interaction results in rich low-energy properties for the tilted Dirac fermions.