Engineering holographic flat fermionic bands

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how holographic duality can be used to engineer strongly interacting systems with flat fermionic bands, revealing a topological phase transition involving merging Berry monopoles.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic model that captures flat band formation and topological phase transitions at strong coupling, a novel approach in condensed matter physics.

Findings

Holographic nematic phase exhibits two Dirac cones approaching and colliding at a critical temperature.

A quadratic dispersion band emerges at the phase transition point.

The model provides a strong-coupling realization of a topological phase transition involving Berry monopoles.

Abstract

In electronic systems with flat bands, such as twisted bilayer graphene, interaction effects govern the structure of the phase diagram. In this paper, we show that a strongly interacting system featuring fermionic flat bands can be engineered using the holographic duality. In particular, we find that in the holographic nematic phase, two bulk Dirac cones separated in momentum space at low temperature, approach each other as the temperature increases. They eventually collide at a critical temperature yielding a flattened band with a quadratic dispersion. On the other hand, in the symmetric (Lifshitz) phase, this quadratic dispersion relation holds for any finite temperature. We therefore obtain a first holographic, strong-coupling realization of a topological phase transition where two Berry monopoles of charge one merge into a single one with charge two, which may be relevant for two- and three-dimensional topological semimetals.