Two dimensional metallic phases from disordered QED${}_3$

Abstract

Metallic phases have been observed in several disordered two dimensional (2d) systems, including thin films near superconductor-insulator transitions and quantum Hall systems near plateau transitions. The existence of 2d metallic phases at zero temperature generally requires an interplay of disorder and interaction effects. Consequently, experimental observations of 2d metallic behavior have largely defied explanation. We formulate a general stability criterion for strongly interacting, massless Dirac fermions against disorder, which describe metallic ground states with vanishing density of states. We show that (2+1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (QED${}_3$) with a large, even number of fermion flavors remains metallic in the presence of weak scalar potential disorder due to the dynamic screening of disorder by gauge fluctuations. We also show that QED${}_3$ with weak mass disorder exhibits a stable, dirty metallic phase in which both interactions and disorder play important roles.

12 pages, including four appendices and one figure

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Cited by in corpus (24)

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• Quantum phase transitions in Dirac fermion systems
• Interplay between short-range correlated disorder and Coulomb interaction in nodal-line semimetals
• QED${}_3$ with quenched disorder: quantum critical states with interactions and disorder
• Dirac Composite Fermions and Emergent Reflection Symmetry about Even Denominator Filling Fractions
• Itinerant quantum multi-criticality of two dimensional Dirac fermions
• Disordered fermionic quantum critical points
• Sign change in the anomalous Hall effect and strong transport effects in a 2D massive Dirac metal due to spin-charge correlated disorder
• Interaction-induced metallicity in a two-dimensional disordered non-Fermi liquid
• Collusion of Interactions and Disorder at the Superfluid-Insulator Transition: A Dirty 2d Quantum Critical Point
• Two-dimensional conductors with interactions and disorder from particle-vortex duality
• Random-mass disorder in the critical Gross-Neveu-Yukawa models
• Disordered quantum critical fixed points from holography
• Effects of random potentials in three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics
• A Bound on Thermalization from Diffusive Fluctuations
• Destabilization of U(1) Dirac spin-liquids on two dimensional non-bipartite lattices by quenched disorder
• Scaling and Diffusion of Dirac Composite Fermions
• Simulating spin systems with Majorana networks
• Pauli-Term-Induced Fixed Points in $d$-dimensional QED
• Universal conductivity at a 2d superconductor-insulator transition: the effects of quenched disorder and Coulomb interaction
• Critical Behavior and Duality in Dimensionally Reduced Planar Chern-Simons Superconductors
• Entanglement Entropy of $(2+1)$D Quantum Critical Points with Quenched Disorder: Dimensional Reduction Approach
• Disordered non-Fermi liquid fixed point for two-dimensional metals at Ising-nematic quantum critical points
• Interplay of interactions and disorder at the charge-density wave transition of two-dimensional Dirac semimetals