Interacting Chern insulator transition on the sphere: revealing the Gross-Neveu-Yukawa criticality

Abstract

In two spatial dimensions, the transition between topological and trivial Chern insulators exemplifies a class of beyond-Landau critical phenomena. We show that the interaction-driven multicritical point of this transition falls into the Gross-Neveu-Yukawa (GNY) universality class, a topic of considerable interest in both high-energy and condensed matter physics. In this work, we focus on the $N=2$ case of the GNY criticality. We employ exact diagonalization of Dirac fermions on a sphere to circumvent the parity anomaly, capitalize on full SO(3) symmetry to reduce finite-size effects, and directly extract operator scaling dimensions from the excitation spectrum. Despite working with only modest system sizes, our results closely match conformal bootstrap predictions for low-scaling dimension operators and reveal several previously uncharacterized higher primaries. These findings highlight the efficacy of spherical geometry for probing interacting Dirac criticality.

5+10 pages, 3 figures