Disorder driven multifractality transition in Weyl nodal loops

TL;DR

This paper investigates how short-range disorder affects Weyl nodal line semimetals, revealing a novel multifractal semimetallic phase, a critical transition to a metal, and an eventual Anderson insulator transition.

Contribution

It uncovers a new disorder-induced multifractal phase and characterizes the critical behavior in Weyl nodal line semimetals, expanding understanding of disorder effects in topological materials.

Findings

Disorder induces a multifractal semimetallic phase.

A critical disorder strength causes a semimetal to metal transition.

At higher disorder, an Anderson transition occurs.

Abstract

The effect of short-range disorder in nodal line semimetals is studied by numerically exact means. For arbitrary small disorder, a novel semimetallic phase is unveiled for which the momentum-space amplitude of the ground-state wave function is concentrated around the nodal line and follows a multifractal distribution. At a critical disorder strength, a semimetal to compressible metal transition occurs, coinciding with a multi- to single-fractality transition. The universality class of this critical point is characterized by the correlation length and dynamical exponents. At considerably higher disorder, an Anderson metal-insulator transition takes place. Our results show that the nature of the semimetallic phase in non-clean samples is fundamentally different from a clean nodal semimetal.