Symmetry-enforced stability of interacting Weyl and Dirac semimetals

Abstract

The nodal and effectively relativistic dispersion featuring in a range of novel materials including two- dimensional graphene and three-dimensional Dirac and Weyl semimetals has attracted enormous interest during the past decade. Here, by studying the structure and symmetry of the diagrammatic expansion, we show that these nodal touching points are in fact perturbatively stable to all orders with respect to generic two-body interactions. For effective low-energy theories relevant for single and multilayer graphene, type-I and type-II Weyl and Dirac semimetals as well as Weyl points with higher topological charge, this stability is shown to be a direct consequence of a spatial symmetry that anti-commutes with the effective Hamiltonian while leaving the interaction invariant. A more refined argument is applied to the honeycomb lattice model of graphene showing that its Dirac points are also perturbatively stable to all orders. We also give examples of nodal Hamiltonians that acquire a gap from interactions as a consequence of symmetries different from those of Weyl and Dirac materials.