# Anomalous Spin Correlations and Mass-Generating Excitonic Instability of   Interacting Weyl Fermions

**Authors:** Michihiro Hirata, Kyohei Ishikawa, Genki Matsuno, Akito Kobayashi,, Kazuya Miyagawa, Masafumi Tamura, Claude Berthier, Kazushi Kanoda

arXiv: 1702.00097 · 2018-02-07

## TL;DR

This paper reveals that in two-dimensional Weyl fermions, long-range Coulomb interactions lead to exotic spin correlations and a transition from massless to massive quasiparticles, demonstrated through NMR measurements and theoretical modeling.

## Contribution

It uncovers the interaction-driven spin correlations and excitonic instability in Weyl fermions, highlighting a mass-generating transition driven by Coulomb interactions.

## Key findings

- Divergent increase of Korringa ratio upon cooling
- Suppression of zero-momentum spin fluctuations due to velocity renormalization
- Evidence of inter-node excitonic fluctuations indicating mass gap formation

## Abstract

Recent advances in the study of nodal Weyl fermions (WFs), quasi-relativistic massless particles, constitute a novel realm of quantum many-body phenomena. The Coulomb interaction in such systems, having a zero density of states at the Fermi level, is of particular interest, since in contrast to conventional correlated metals, its long-ranged component is unscreened. Here, through nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) measurements, we unveil the exotic spin correlations of two-dimensional WFs in an organic material, causing a divergent increase of the Korringa ratio by a factor of 1000 upon cooling, in striking contrast with conventional metallic behaviors. Combined with model calculations, we show that this divergence stems from the interaction-driven velocity renormalization that almost exclusively suppresses the zero-momentum spin fluctuations. At low temperatures, the NMR rate shows a remarkable increase, which is shown by numerical analyses to correspond to inter-node excitonic fluctuations, precursor of a transition from massless to massive quasiparticles.

---
Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1702.00097