Nodal points of Weyl semimetals survive the presence of moderate disorder
Invited
Abstract
This talk addresses the physics of individual three-dimensional Weyl nodes subject to a moderate concentration of disorder. Previous analysis indicates the presence of a quantum phase transition below which disorder becomes irrelevant and the integrity of sharp nodal points of vanishing spectral density is preserved in this system. This statement appears to be at variance with the inevitable presence of statistically rare fluctuations which cannot be considered as weak and must have strong influence on the system's spectrum, no matter how small the average concentration. We here reconcile the two pictures by demonstrating that rare fluctuation potentials in the Weyl system generate a peculiar type of resonances which carry spectral density in any neighborhood of zero energy, but never at zero. In this way, the vanishing of the DoS for weak disorder survives the inclusion of rare events. We demonstrate this feature by considering three different models of disorder, each emphasizing specific aspects of the problem: a simplistic box potential model, a model with Gaussian distributed disorder, and one with a finite number of s -wave scatterers.
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Presenters
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Michael Buchhold
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Caltech
Authors
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Michael Buchhold
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Caltech
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Sebastian Diehl
University of Cologne
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Alex Altland
University of Cologne