Critical Behaviors of Anderson Transitions in Three Dimensional Orthogonal Classes with Particle-hole Symmetries

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical behaviors of Anderson transitions in three-dimensional orthogonal classes with particle-hole symmetries, providing critical exponents and analyzing universality classes for different models.

Contribution

It offers the first precise estimates of critical exponents for Anderson transitions in 3D classes CI and BDI, and compares their universality classes.

Findings

Critical exponent for class CI: ν=1.16±0.02

Critical exponent for class BDI: ν=0.80±0.02

Disorder induces a transition from topological insulator to diffusive metal

Abstract

From transfer-matrix calculation of localization lengths and their finite-size scaling analyses, we evaluate critical exponents of the Anderson metal-insulator transition in three dimensional (3D) orthogonal class with particle-hole symmetry, class CI, as $\nu=1.16\pm 0.02$. We further study disorder-driven quantum phase transitions in the 3D nodal line Dirac semimetal model, which belongs to class BDI, and estimate critical exponent as $\nu=0.80\pm 0.02$. From a comparison of the critical exponents, we conclude that a disorder-driven re-entrant insulator-metal transition from the topological insulator phase in the class BDI to the diffusive metal phase belongs to the same universality class as the Anderson transition in the 3D class BDI. We also argue that an infinitesimally small disorder drives the nodal line Dirac semimetal in the clean limit to the diffusive metal.