1 Department of Physics, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China;
2 School of Science, Xi'an Technological University, Xi'an 710032, China;
3 Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Quantum criticality is closely related to the existence of two phases with unrelated symmetry breaking. In this paper, we study Néel and Kekulé valence bond state (VBS) quantum criticality in Dirac semimetals with four-fermion interactions. Our results show that all possible dynamical masses yield the same critical coupling, which exhibits the phenomenon that all possible phases meet at a multicritical point (e.g., a tricritical point for the Néel, Kekulé-VBS and semimetallic phases). In terms of the well-established Wess-Zumino-Witten field theory, we investigate the typical criticality for the transition between Néel and Kekulé-VBS phases, and the compatible Néel-Kekulé-VBS mass matrices imply the existence of a non-Landau transition between the Néel and Kekulé-VBS phases. We show the existence of mutual duality in the defect-driven Néel-Kekulé-VBS transition near the non-Landau critical point and find that this mutual duality results from the presence of a mutual Chern-Simons term. We also study the mutual duality based on dual topological excitations.
(Metal-insulator transitions and other electronic transitions)
Fund:
Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11647111, 11504285, and 11674026) and the Research Start-up Funds of Guizhou University, China (Grant No. 201538).
Altmetric calculates a score based on the online attention an article receives. Each coloured thread in the circle represents a different type of online attention. The number in the centre is the Altmetric score. Social media and mainstream news media are the main sources that calculate the score. Reference managers such as Mendeley are also tracked but do not contribute to the score. Older articles often score higher because they have had more time to get noticed. To account for this, Altmetric has included the context data for other articles of a similar age.