Fermionic Quasiparticles Research Articles

Symmetry-enforced ideal lanternlike phonons in the ternary nitride Li6WN4

Condensed matter systems contain both fermionic and bosonic quasiparticles. Owing to the constraint imposed by the Fermi level, ideal material candidate for the emergent particles with higher-dimensional degeneracy manifold (i.e., nodal lines and nodal surfaces) has not been found in electronic systems. This paper demonstrates that according to the first-principle calculations and symmetry analysis, realistic ternary nitride Li$_6$WN$_4$ features ideal (nearly flat) nodal-surface and nodal-line structures in its phonon spectra. These nodal degeneracies are shaped like lanterns, and their existence is guaranteed by nonsymmorphic symmetry. The corresponding topological phonon surface state covers exactly half the surface Brillouin zone (BZ) and can thereby be distinguished from those of conventional nodal-line and nodal-surface semimetals. The results of our study demonstrate the existence of ideal lantern-like phonons in realistic materials, which enriches the classification of topological quantum phases and provides a good basis for investigating the interaction between nodal-line and nodal-surface phonons in a single material.

Evidence for Moiré Trions in Twisted MoSe2 Homobilayers.

Moiré superlattices of van der Waals structures offer a powerful platform for engineering band structure and quantum states. For instance, Moiré superlattices in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, ABC trilayer graphene have been shown to harbor correlated insulating and superconducting states, while in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) twisted bilayers, Moiré excitons have been identified. Here we show that the effects of a Moiré superlattice on the band structure are general: In TMD twisted bilayers, excitons and exciton complexes can be trapped in the superlattice in a manner analogous to ultracold bosonic or Fermionic atoms in optical lattices. Using twisted MoSe2 homobilayers as a model system, we present evidence for Moiré trions. Our results thus open possibilities for designer van der Waals structures hosting arrays of Fermionic or bosonic quasiparticles, which can be used to realize tunable many-body states crucial for quantum simulation and quantum information processing.

Energy spectrum of massive Dirac particles in gapped graphene with Morse potential

In this paper, we study the massive Dirac equation with the presence of the Morse potential in polar coordinate. The Dirac Hamiltonian is written as two second-order differential equations in terms of two spinor wavefunctions. Since the motion of electrons in graphene is propagated like relativistic fermionic quasi-particles, then one is considered only with pseudospin symmetry for aligned spin and unaligned spin by arbitrary k. Next, we use the confluent Heun’s function for calculating the wavefunctions and the eigenvalues. Then, the corresponding energy spectrum obtains in terms of N and k. Afterward, we plot the graphs of the energy spectrum and the wavefunctions in terms of k and r, respectively. Moreover, we investigate the graphene band structure by a linear dispersion relation which creates an energy gap in the Dirac points called gapped graphene. Finally, we plot the graph of the valence and conduction bands in terms of wavevectors.

Analog of Gravitational Anomaly in Topological Chiral Superconductors

It is known that the contribution of torsion to the equation for the chiral Weyl fermions can be equivalently considered in terms of the axial $U(1)$ gauge field. In this scenario the gravitational field transforms to the $U(1)$ gauge field. Here we show that in chiral superconductors the opposite scenario takes place: the electromagnetic $U(1)$ field serves as the spin connection for the Bogoliubov fermionic quasiparticles. As a result the electromagnetic field gives rise to the gravitational anomaly, which contains the extra factor $1/3$ in the corresponding Adler-Bell-Jackiw equation as compared with the conventional chiral anomaly. We also consider the gravitational anomaly produced in neutral Weyl superfluids by the analog of the gravitational instanton, the process of creation and annihilation of the 3D topological objects -- hopfions. The gravitational instanton leads to creation of the chiral charge.

Instabilities of quantum critical metals in the limit $N_f\rightarrow0$

We study a model in 2+1 dimensions composed of a Fermi surface of N_fNf flavors of fermions coupled to scalar fluctuations near quantum critical points (QCPs). The N_f\rightarrow0Nf→0 limit allows us to non-perturbatively calculate the long-range behavior of fermion correlation functions. We use this to calculate charge, spin and pair susceptibilities near different QCPs at zero and finite temperatures, with zero and finite order parameter gaps. While fluctuations smear out the fermionic quasiparticles, we find QCPs where the overall effect of fluctuations leads to enhanced pairing. We also find QCPs where the fluctuations induce spin and charge density wave instabilities for a finite interval of order parameter fluctuation gaps at T=0T=0. We restore a subset of the diagrams suppressed in the N_f\rightarrow0Nf→0 limit, all diagrams with internal fermion loops with at most 2 vertices, and find that this does not change the long-range behavior of correlators except right at the QCPs.

Fibonacci Anyons Versus Majorana Fermions: A Monte Carlo Approach to the Compilation of Braid Circuits in SU(2)k Anyon Models

We have studied ${\rm SU}(2)_k$ anyon models, assessing their prospects for topological quantum computation. In particular, we have compared the Ising ($k=2$) anyon and Fibonacci ($k=3$) anyon models, motivated by their potential for future realizations based on Majorana fermion quasiparticles or exotic fractional quantum-Hall states, respectively. The quantum computational performance of the different anyon models is quantified at single qubit level by the difference between a target unitary operator and its approximation realised by anyon braiding. To facilitate efficient comparisons, we have developed a Monte Carlo enhanced Solovay-Kitaev quantum compiler algorithm that finds optimal braid words in polynomial time from the exponentially large search tree. Since universal quantum computation cannot be achieved within the Ising anyon model by braiding alone, we have introduced an additional elementary phase gate to model a non-topological measurement process, which restores universality of the anyon model at the cost of breaking the full topological protection. We model conventional kinds of decoherence processes algorithmically by introducing a controllable noise term to all non-topological gate operations. We find that for reasonable levels of decoherence, even the hybrid Ising anyon model retains a significant topological advantage over a conventional, non-topological, quantum computer. Furthermore, we find that only surprisingly short anyon braids are ever required to be compiled due to the gate noise exceeding the intrinsic error of the braid words already for word lengths of the order of $100$ elementary braids. We conclude that the future for hybrid topological quantum computation remains promising.

Thermal conductivity of an ultracold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover

Recent experiments on sound waves in a unitary Fermi gas reveal many transport properties about strongly interacting fermions. Sound propagates through the coupling of momentum and heat transport, and attenuates strongly with the presence of a phase transition. In this work, focusing on the temperature regimes near and below the superfluid critical temperature T_c in the BCS-BEC crossover, we present a Kubo-based microscopic calculation of thermal conductivity kappa, which has not attracted much attention compared to the shear viscosity. Our approach primarily addresses the contributions of the fermionic quasiparticles to thermal transport and our results return to the kinetic descriptions at high temperatures. kappa drops upon crossing the pseudogap temperature T^*, and its temperature dependence changes below T_c. The drops become more pronounced on the weakly coupled BCS side, where the Pauli blocking causes the upturn of kappa above T^*. Our calculations fit well with the sound measurement on the damping rate.

Shot noise distinguishes Majorana fermions from vortices injected in the edge mode of a chiral p-wave superconductor

The chiral edge modes of a topological superconductor support two types of excitations: fermionic quasiparticles known as Majorana fermions and \bm\pi𝛑-phase domain walls known as edge vortices. Edge vortices are injected pairwise into counter-propagating edge modes by a flux bias or voltage bias applied to a Josephson junction. An unpaired edge mode carries zero electrical current on average, but there are time-dependent current fluctuations. We calculate the shot noise power produced by a sequence of edge vortices and find that it increases logarithmically with their spacing — even if the spacing is much larger than the core size so the vortices do not overlap. This nonlocality produces an anomalous \bm{V\ln V}𝐕ln𝐕 increase of the shot noise in a voltage-biased geometry, which serves as a distinguishing feature in comparison with the linear-in-\bm V𝐕 Majorana fermion shot noise.

How ‘pairons’ are revealed in the electronic specific heat of cuprates

Understanding the thermodynamic properties of high-Tc cuprate superconductors is a key step to establish a satisfactory theory of these materials. The electronic specific heat is highly unconventional, distinctly non-BCS, with remarkable doping-dependent features extending well beyond Tc. The pairon concept, bound holes in their local antiferromagnetic environment, has successfully described the tunneling and photoemission spectra. In this article, we show that the model explains the distinctive features of the entropy and specific heat throughout the temperature-doping phase diagram. Their interpretation connects unambiguously the pseudogap, existing up to T*, to the superconducting state below Tc. In the underdoped case, the specific heat is dominated by pairon excitations, following Bose statistics, while with increasing doping, both bosonic excitations and fermionic quasiparticles coexist.

Topological superconducting transition driven by time-reversal-symmetry breaking

Three-dimensional line-nodal superconductors exhibit nontrivial topology, which is protected by the time-reversal symmetry. Here we investigate four types of short-range interaction between the gapless line-nodal fermionic quasiparticles by carrying renormalization group analysis. We find that such interactions can induce the dynamical breaking of time-reversal symmetry, which alters the topology and might lead to six possible distinct superconducting states, distinguished by the group representations. After computing the susceptibilities for all the possible phase-transition instabilities, we establish that the superconducting pairing characterized by idxz-wave gap symmetry is the leading instability in noncentrosymmetric superconductors. Appropriate extension of this approach is promising to pick out the most favorable superconducting pairing during similar topology-changing transition in the polar phase of 3He.

Fermionic order by disorder in a van der Waals antiferromagnet

CeTe3 is a unique platform to investigate the itinerant magnetism in a van der Waals (vdW) coupled metal. Despite chemical pressure being a promising route to boost quantum fluctuation in this system, a systematic study on the chemical pressure effect on Ce3+(4f1) states is absent. Here, we report on the successful growth of a series of Se doped single crystals of CeTe3. We found a fluctuation driven exotic magnetic rotation from the usual easy-axis ordering to an unusual hard-axis ordering. Unlike in localized magnetic systems, near-critical magnetism can increase itinerancy hand-in-hand with enhancing fluctuation of magnetism. Thus, seemingly unstable hard-axis ordering emerges through kinetic energy gain, with the self-consistent observation of enhanced magnetic fluctuation (disorder). As far as we recognize, this order-by-disorder process in fermionic system is observed for the first time within vdW materials. Our finding opens a unique experimental platform for direct visualization of the rich quasiparticle Fermi surface deformation associated with the Fermionic order-by-disorder process. Also, the search for emergent exotic phases by further tuning of quantum fluctuation is suggested as a promising future challenge.

Wiedemann-Franz law in a non-Fermi liquid and Majorana central charge: Thermoelectric transport in a two-channel Kondo system

Quantum dot devices allow one to access the critical point of the two-channel Kondo model. The effective critical theory involves a free Majorana fermion quasiparticle localized on the dot. As a consequence, this critical point shows both the phenomenon of non-Fermi liquid physics and fractionalization. Although a violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law is considered a defining feature of non-Fermi liquid systems, we show by exact calculations that it holds at the critical point, providing a counterexample to this lore. Furthermore, we show that the fractionalized Majorana character of the critical point can be unambiguously detected from the heat conductivity, opening the door to a direct experimental measurement of the elusive Majorana central charge $c=\tfrac{1}{2}$.

Interacting Dirac materials

We investigate the extent to which the class of Dirac materials in two-dimensions provides general statements about the behavior of both fermionic and bosonic Dirac quasiparticles in the interacting regime. For both quasiparticle types, we find common features for the interaction induced renormalization of the conical Dirac spectrum. We perform the perturbative renormalization analysis and compute the self-energy for both quasiparticle types with different interactions and collate previous results from the literature whenever necessary. Guided by the systematic presentation of our results in table , we conclude that long-range interactions generically lead to an increase of the slope of the single-particle Dirac cone, whereas short-range interactions lead to a decrease. The quasiparticle statistics does not qualitatively impact the self-energy correction for long-range repulsion but does affect the behavior of short-range coupled systems, giving rise to different thermal power-law contributions. The possibility of a universal description of the Dirac materials based on these features is also mentioned.

Superfluid 3He in a Nematic Aerogel

In nematic aerogels, their constituent fibers are oriented along the same direction. In liquid 3He filling such aerogels, the scattering of Fermi quasiparticles at ultralow temperatures becomes anisotropic. This makes it possible to obtain new superfluid phases of 3He, which are not observed in bulk 3He. In this article, results of NMR investigation of these new superfluid phases of 3He in aerogels with different porosities are compared. We describe the methods for identifying these phases and consider some topological defects observed in them.

Fermionic Analogue of High Temperature Hawking Radiation in Black Phosphorus**Supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2016YFA0300902 and 2016YFA0202300), the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB921001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11774396, 91850120 and 11974045), and the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of CAS (Grant Nos. XDB30000000

Time-periodic laser driving can create nonequilibrium states not accessible in equilibrium, opening new regimes in materials engineering and topological phase transitions. We report that black phosphorus (BP) exhibits spatially nonuniform topological Floquet–Dirac states under laser illumination, mimicking the “gravity” felt by fermionic quasiparticles in the same way as that for a Schwarzschild black hole (SBH). Quantum tunneling of electrons from a type-II Dirac cone (inside BH) to a type-I Dirac cone (outside BH) emits an SBH-like Planck radiation spectrum. The Hawking temperature TH obtained for a fermionic analog of BH in the bilayer BP is approximately 3 K, which is several orders of magnitude higher than that in previous works. Our work sheds light on increasing TH from the perspective of engineering 2D materials by time-periodic light illumination. The predicted SBH-like Hawking radiation, accessible in BP thin films, provides clues to probe analogous astrophysical phenomena in solids.

Effect of Coulomb repulsion on the London penetration depth in cuprate superconductors

We study the effect of Coulomb repulsion between oxygen holes on the London penetration depth λ based on the concept of spin-polaron nature of Fermi quasiparticles in cuprates superconductors. It is shown that for the generally accepted values of the parameters of the spin-fermion model, taking into account the Coulomb interaction, both the one-site Hubbard Up and interaction between holes on the next-nearest-neighbor oxygen ions V2, allows one to achieve a much better agreement of the calculated temperature dependencies of the value λ−2 with the experimental data in La2−xSrxCuO4 in a wide range around optimal doping.

Effects of fermion-fermion interactions and impurity scatterings on fermion velocities in the line-nodal superconductors

We investigate the roles of both fermion-fermion interactions and impurities in pinning down the fates of fermion velocities in the line-nodal superconductors. Distinct sorts of four-fermion interactions and impurities as well as competitions among them are unbiasedly taken into account by adopting renormalization group approach. We firstly derive the coupled evolutions of all interaction parameters. Whether and how the interplay between fermionic interactions and impurities affects fermion velocities are then carefully studied. After performing the detailed analysis, we find the low-energy fates of fermion velocities are heavily dictated by fermion-fermion interactions. In addition to preserving isotropic, fermion velocities hinging sensitively upon initial values of interaction parameters can either exhibit extremely anisotropic or flow to certain finite anisotropy. With impurities being switched on, we reach that the behaviors of fermion velocities at clean limit are considerably robust. This indicates that fermion-fermion interactions dominate over the impurities in the low-energy regime. Moreover, several physical implications including the density of states and compressibility of fermionic quasiparticles are substantially modified due to the significant renormalization of fermion velocities in the low-energy regime.

Effect of Crystal Field on the Electronic Structure of the Two-Band Hubbard Model with Spin Crossover

We consider the change in the electronic structure of the two-band Hubbard model in the regime of strong electron correlations with spin crossover upon the passage through the crossover point depending on the crystal field growth. An abrupt semimetal–insulator–semimetal transition is detected during the passage through the spin crossover point in the absence of the spin–orbit interaction, which is accompanied by a jumpwise redistribution of the partial spectral weight between the poles of the Green function of Fermi quasiparticles. The role of the spin–orbit interaction and the change in the surface topology of surface of one-particle Green function zeros are considered.

Microscopic theory of the friction force exerted on a quantum impurity in one-dimensional quantum liquids

We study the motion of a slow quantum impurity in one-dimensional environments focusing on systems of strongly interacting bosons and weakly interacting fermions. While at zero temperature the impurity motion is frictionless, at low temperatures finite friction appears. The dominant process is the scattering of the impurity off two fermionic quasiparticles. We evaluate the friction force and show that, at low temperatures, it scales either as the fourth or the sixth power of temperature, depending on the system parameters. This is a result of the scattering of the impurity off two fermionic quasiparticles that are situated around different Fermi points. It is the dominant process at low temperatures. We also evaluate the contribution to the friction force originating from the scattering of the impurity off two fermionic quasiparticles that are situated around different Fermi points. It behaves as the tenth power of temperature.

The range of non-Kitaev terms and fractional particles in \u03b1-RuCl3

Significant efforts have focused on the magnetic excitations of relativistic Mott insulators, predicted to realize the Kitaev quantum spin liquid (QSL). This exactly solvable model involves a highly entangled state resulting from bond-dependent Ising interactions that produce excitations which are non-local in terms of spin flips. A key challenge in real materials is identifying the relative size of the non-Kitaev terms and their role in the emergence or suppression of fractional excitations. Here, we identify the energy and temperature boundaries of non-Kitaev interactions by direct comparison of the Raman susceptibility of α-RuCl3 with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results for the Kitaev QSL. Moreover, we further confirm the fractional nature of the magnetic excitations, which is given by creating a pair of fermionic quasiparticles. Interestingly, this fermionic response remains valid in the non-Kitaev range. Our results and focus on the use of the Raman susceptibility provide a stringent new test for future theoretical and experimental studies of QSLs.