Gross-Neveu-XY quantum criticality in moiré Dirac materials

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Abstract

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials offer a highly tunable platform for engineering electronic band structures and interactions. By employing techniques such as twisting, gating, or applying pressure, these systems enable precise control over the electronic excitation spectrum. In moiré bilayer graphene, the tunability facilitates the transition from a symmetric Dirac semimetal phase through a quantum critical point into an interaction-induced long-range ordered phase with a finite band gap. At charge neutrality, the ordered state proposed to emerge from twist-angle tuning is the Kramers intervalley-coherent insulator. In this case, the transition falls into the quantum universality class of the relativistic Gross-Neveu-XY model in 2+1 dimensions. Here, we refine estimates for the critical exponents characterizing this universality class using an expansion around the lower critical space-time dimension of two. We compute the order-parameter anomalous dimension ηφ and the correlation-length exponent ν at one-loop order, and the fermion anomalous dimension ηψ at two-loop order. Combining these results with previous findings from the expansion around the upper critical dimension, we obtain improved estimates for the universal exponents in 2+1 dimensions via Padé interpolation. For Nf=4 four-component Dirac fermions, relevant to moiré bilayer graphene, we estimate 1/ν=0.916(5), ηφ=0.926(13), and ηψ=0.0404(13). For Nf=2, potentially relevant to recent tetralayer WSe2 experiments, the Gross-Neveu-XY fixed point may be unstable owing to a fixed-point collision at Nf,c, with Nf,c=1+2+O(ϵ) in the expansion around the lower critical dimension.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number205129
JournalPhysical Review B
Volume111
Issue number20
Publication statusPublished - 15 Apr 2025
Peer-reviewedYes