Interplay between interaction and chiral anomaly in the holographic approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interaction effects and chiral anomalies influence quantum critical behavior in strongly coupled systems using holographic duality, revealing new critical exponents in current correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic approach to study the interplay between correlations and topological terms, uncovering novel critical exponents influenced by anomaly and locality.

Findings

Discovered new critical exponents in current-current correlations.

Highlighted the role of Chern-Simons term and emergent locality.

Suggested relevance to topological insulators with strong interactions.

Abstract

Strongly coupled conformal field theory appears to describe universal scaling around quantum criticality, where critical exponents reflect the nature of emergent excitations. In particular, novel symmetries can emerge from strong interactions, expected to be responsible for quantum number fractionalization. The underlying mechanism has been proposed that an emergent enhanced symmetry allows a topological term associated with anomaly, which assigns a fermion's quantum number to a topological excitation, referred as the Goldstone-Wilczek current. Although this mechanism has been verified in one dimensional interacting electrons, where either spinons or holons are identified with topological solitons, its generalization to higher dimensions is beyond the field theoretic framework in the respect that interplay between interaction and anomaly cannot be taken into account sincerely within the field theory technique above one dimension. In this study we examine the interplay between correlations and topological terms based on the holographic approach, allowing us to incorporate such nonperturbative quantum effects via solving classical equations of motion but on a curved space. We solve the Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory on the Reissner-Nordstr\"om-AdS$_5$ in the extremal limit, and uncover novel critical exponents to appear in the current-current correlation functions, where both the emergent locality and the Chern-Simons term play an important role in such critical exponents. We speculate that the corresponding conformal field theory may result from interacting U(1) currents with chiral anomaly at finite density, expected to be applicable to topological insulators with strong interactions, where dyon-type excitations appear to carry nontrivial fermion's quantum numbers.