2017/07/31 by Bitan Roy, Vladimir Juričić, Vladimir Juricic · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Charge (physics) #Condensed matter physics #Coulomb #Dirac (video compression format) #Electron #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #Mathematical physics #Omega #Physics #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Quasiparticle #Semimetal #Sigma #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Weyl semimetal #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.str-el #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.96.155117
published as Phys. Rev. B 96, 155117 (2017) · 21 Pages, 1 Figure: Published Version in PRB
openalex publication_date 2017/10/12 · arxiv created 2017/10/17 · arxiv updated 2017/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Optical conductivity (OC) can serve as a measure of correlation effects in a wide range of condensed-matter systems. We show that the long-range tail of the Coulomb interaction yields a universal correction to the OC in a three-dimensional Weyl semimetal \ensuremathσ(\mathrm\ensuremathΩ)=\ensuremathσ0(\mathrm\ensuremathΩ)[1+(1)/(N+1)], where \ensuremathσ0(\mathrm\ensuremathΩ)=Ne02\mathrm\ensuremathΩ/(12hv) is the OC in the noninteracting system, with v as the actual (renormalized) Fermi velocity of Weyl quasiparticles at frequency \mathrm\ensuremathΩ, and e0 is the electron charge in vacuum. Such universal enhancement of OC, which depends only on the number of Weyl nodes near the Fermi level (N), is a remarkable consequence of an intriguing conspiracy among the quantum-critical nature of an interacting Weyl liquid, marginal irrelevance of the long-range Coulomb interaction, and violation of hyperscaling in three dimensions, and can directly be measured in recently discovered Weyl as well as Dirac materials. By contrast, a local density-density interaction produces a nonuniversal correction to the OC, stemming from the nonrenormalizable nature of the corresponding interacting field theory.