Short range Coulomb correlations render massive Dirac fermions massless

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that strong electron correlations can effectively cancel the mass gap in Dirac fermions on a honeycomb lattice, restoring their massless, semi-metallic state through a phase transition.

Contribution

It reveals how on-site electron interactions can induce a transition from massive to massless Dirac fermions, a novel insight into correlation effects in Dirac materials.

Findings

Massive Dirac fermions become massless beyond a critical interaction strength.

Increasing electron correlation leads to a transition into a Mott insulator.

The semi-metallic phase persists over a wide parameter range at small ionic potential.

Abstract

Tight binding electrons on a honeycomb lattice are described by an effective Dirac theory at low energies. Lowering symmetry by an alternate ionic potential ($\Delta$) generates a single-particle gap in the spectrum. We employ the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) technique, to study the effect of on-site electron correlation ($U$) on massive Dirac fermions. For a fixed mass parameter $\Delta$, we find that beyond a critical value $U_{c1}(\Delta)$ massive Dirac fermions become massless. Further increasing $U$ beyond $U_{c2}(\Delta)$, there will be another phase transition to the Mott insulating state. Therefore the competition between the single-particle gap parameter, $\Delta$, and the Hubbard $U$ restores the semi-metallic nature of the parent Hamiltonian. The width of the intermediate semi-metallic regime shrinks by increasing the ionic potential. However, at small values of $\Delta$, there is a wide interval of $U$ values for which the system remains semi-metal.