Non-Hermitian band descriptions capture how loss, gain, and environmental coupling reshape quantum matter, yet most experimental probes remain wave based or dynamical. Here we develop an equilibrium charge-response route to spectral compression in Dirac materials. In the real-spectrum regime, invariance of the particle-number operator under the similarity transformation makes the quantum capacitance exactly that of the Hermitian partner, so the whole non-Hermitian content is carried by the Petermann factor. In a minimal nonreciprocal graphene model, hopping imbalance suppresses the Dirac velocity, enhancing the low-energy density of states and the capacitance as an exceptional point is approached. At charge neutrality the capacitance stays linear in temperature, with its slope enhanced relative to the Hermitian value. A perpendicular magnetic field recasts the same compression as a collapse of the Landau-level ladder, drawing more levels into the thermal window. In two dimensions, the capacitance enhancement relative to the Hermitian partner coincides exactly with the Petermann factor, even though the two have entirely different origins. This relation provides a controlled starting point for extending equilibrium thermodynamic probes to non-Hermitian electronic systems with interactions, disorder, and reservoir coupling.
Non-Hermitian band descriptions capture how loss, gain, and environmental coupling reshape quantum matter, yet most experimental probes remain wave based or dynamical. Here we develop an equilibrium charge-response route to spectral compression in Dirac materials. In the real-spectrum regime, invariance of the particle-number operator under the similarity transformation makes the quantum capacitance exactly that of the Hermitian partner, so the whole non-Hermitian content is carried by the Petermann factor. In a minimal nonreciprocal graphene model, hopping imbalance suppresses the Dirac velocity, enhancing the low-energy density of states and the capacitance as an exceptional point is approached. At charge neutrality the capacitance stays linear in temperature, with its slope enhanced relative to the Hermitian value. A perpendicular magnetic field recasts the same compression as a collapse of the Landau-level ladder, drawing more levels into the thermal window. In two dimensions, the capacitance enhancement relative to the Hermitian partner coincides exactly with the Petermann factor, even though the two have entirely different origins. This relation provides a controlled starting point for extending equilibrium thermodynamic probes to non-Hermitian electronic systems with interactions, disorder, and reservoir coupling.
We establish scaling relations governing the equilibrium thermodynamics of real-spectrum non-Hermitian Dirac fermions in a magnetic field. Assuming thermalization with respect to the quasi-Hermitian Hamiltonian, a similarity transformation maps the system at the same applied field onto a Hermitian Dirac model with reduced velocity, while the Landau-level spectrum also admits a representation in terms of a reduced effective magnetic field. This structure yields scaling relations for the chemical potential, entropy, heat capacities, and orbital magnetic response in different thermodynamic ensembles. At fixed projected filling factor (PFF), the self-consistent chemical potential follows the compressed ladder of Landau levels, and the canonical thermodynamic functions are rescaled Hermitian responses. At fixed chemical potential, Landau-level crossings generate oscillatory caloric and magnetic responses governed by the same spectral compression. Quasistatic non-Hermitian deformation at fixed PFF further yields adiabatic temperature scaling. More broadly, these results establish a thermodynamic framework for real-spectrum non-Hermitian quantum matter and provide a starting point for incorporating the effects of interactions and disorder within the same formalism.
Non-Hermitian (NH) Dirac semimetals describe open gain--loss systems. Yet at charge neutrality, models featuring real spectrum often look Hermitian-like, with NH effects absorbed into renormalized band parameters. Here, we show that a response-based diagnostic of effective non-Hermiticity can be formulated using minimal pseudo-Lorentz-symmetry-breaking deformations, which separate observables that remain captured by parameter redefinitions from those that exhibit irreducible NH structure. For a two-dimensional NH Dirac semimetal in the weak-NH, real-spectrum regime, we analyze Dirac-cone tilt and velocity anisotropy and compute representative probes of spectral structure, quantum geometry, optical response, and viscoelasticity at zero temperature. We find that tilt yields an NH-dependent slope of the density of states that cannot be collapsed to a single effective velocity, while velocity anisotropy can be captured by effective-velocity reparametrization. Furthermore, the quantum metric and collisionless optical conductivities provide NH-insensitive benchmarks (with the nonlinear conductivity symmetry selected), whereas the shear viscosity offers a discriminator through its tensor structure. Our results identify minimal deformations and bulk response channels that enable access to effective non-Hermiticity even when the spectrum remains real.
A static deformation of graphene can act on its Dirac electrons as a valley-odd magnetic field. In sublattice-gapped graphene this field makes the two valleys add in the parity-odd response rather than cancel. We derive the equilibrium thermodynamics of this effect and separate it from the finite-frequency transport response. At fixed electrochemical potential, reversing the pseudomagnetic field removes every nonzero pseudo-Landau level in the continuum theory. The remaining grand-potential difference is fixed by the spectrally asymmetric zeroth level. The static charge response is a thermally broadened plateau confined to the gap and has no metallic m/∣μ∣ tail. Near a band edge, pseudofield reversal transfers Bln2 of entropy per unsplit zero-mode state in the low-temperature window. The fixed-μ heat capacity has two side lobes per edge and a universal peak 0.439229DBkB. We then formulate a definite constant-gate-voltage circuit and show that the measured sheet heat capacity depends on the electrical boundary condition. The full massive-Dirac density of states and an exact finite-field pseudo-Landau-level calculation give the same gate crossover in their common limit. At fixed carrier number, the low-temperature edge value is −2(ln2)2DBkB, rather than a node. A finite geometric capacitance gives a continuous and experimentally tunable interpolation. Finally, we give a trace-free triaxial strain geometry, a disorder--interaction window, and realistic calorimetric and quantum-capacitance scales. The field-reversal protocol isolates an equilibrium electromechanical anomaly without a real magnetic field.
After its first isolation by Geim and Novoselov in 2004, graphene has grown quickly into an independent subfield of contemporary condensed matter physics, counting thousands of publications. This material has attracted so much attention not only because it is truly two-dimensional -- a feature long thought to be impossible to be realized in nature -- but also because it is the prime representative of a new class of condensed matter systems, the Dirac materials, whose electronic spectrum disperses linearly around isolated points in the Brillouin zone. An outstanding consequence of this linear energy-momentum dispersion is the collapse of the Fermi surface to isolated points at charge neutrality, accompanied by a vanishing single-particle density of states. While this feature of the noninteracting model is what separates graphene from most other, more conventional condensed matter systems, giving rise to many of its astounding physical properties, it leads to severe computational complications when extending the model to contain two-body interactions and/or disorder. In this thesis we consider both extensions separately. After rigorously deriving the low-energy quantum field theory from a tight-binding model and establishing the one-particle irreducible (1PI) vertex functions as the fundamental building blocks of correlation functions, we construct a nonperturbative formalism for the calculation of these vertex functions using the well-established functional renormalization group (fRG). By combining the fRG with the Keldysh formalism, accounting for possible external electromagnetic fields and nontrivial initial correlations, this framework is capable of handling thermal equilibrium and true nonequilibrium alike. To circumvent some of the technical problems of the standard fRG formalism when treating fermionic systems at finite density, we also explore a variant of the fRG, where the chemical potential is interpreted as a flow parameter. We obtain hierarchical sets of flow equations, which describe the change of the 1PI vertex functions upon varying an artificial cutoff scale or the chemical potential, respectively. These nonperturbative formalisms have been used to calculate the renormalization of the Fermi velocity and the static dielectric function at finite temperature and density in the strong coupling regime as an explicit demonstration of their capabilities. Since the Keldysh fRG is an exact formulation of quantum field theory, in particular when external magnetic fields are present, it should be possible to describe the fractional quantum Hall effect in this framework. However, the typical truncation schemes that are currently available to approximately solve the fRG flow equation fail to account for the nontrivial correlation effects necessary to access the fractional quantum Hall regime. To circumvent this problem we consider a modified field theory, where these correlations are implemented ``by hand'' via a Chern-Simons gauge field, coupling to the fermions in addition to the Coulomb interaction term. This modified field theory is analyzed in a stationary phase approximation including Gaussian fluctuations. The electromagnetic response tensor is calculated in the random phase approximation, yielding the Hall conductivities. In the second part of this thesis we consider disordered Dirac fermions in the absence of two-particle interactions. After sketching how the most general disorder potential for Dirac fermions arises from a tight-binding model, we first consider an explicit physical scenario, a disordered graphene pn junction in the presence of a quantizing magnetic field perpendicular to the graphene sheet. We derive an effective one-dimensional theory for the chiral states that propagate along the junction interface and calculate the full conductance distribution in the crossover between the clean and the strong-disorder limit, via an exact solution of a Fokker-Planck equation. Lastly, we develop a nonperturbative approach to calculate the disorder induced self-energy that is based on exact Schwinger-Dyson equations and Ward identities, not only for graphene, but also for other paradigmatic semimetals with a nodal point dispersion.
Thermodynamics coupled quantum features on electron and hole dynamics in Dirac materials is quite interesting and crucial for real device applications such as electronic, thermoelectric, energy devices, and quantum circuits. The correlation between the formation of electron-hole puddles near the charge neutrality point (CNP) and the role of disorder in terms of differential entropy is fundamentally important for the Dirac transport mechanism in graphene systems, but not yet well-established. With this motivation, we map the energy quantization for Dirac materials through the empirical relation of voltage-driven charge density in monolayer graphene, using the differential entropy (h)-ruled wavevector (k) mechanics. For this work, we propose the four postulates which are the key observable descriptions of earlier research reports, to study the precise electronic transport via an entropy-guided wavevector propagation approach, along with the Klein paradox, which pertains to the ultrafast dynamics in the Dirac or quasi-Dirac systems. The introduced h-ruled k and h-ruled N relations generalize the electron dynamics in both the unbounded and potentially bounded Dirac systems. Through the quantization mapping procedure under different voltage-driven potential (U=eV) boundary conditions, the observed energy shift from lower to excited quantum state obeys the relation of N(k)=N(U)^3; here, N(U) is the voltage-driven potential energy contribution factor for the quantum state existence. In such a way, the mapped electron density, diffusion coefficient, and mobility for bounded Dirac materials are increased by orders of N^3, N^2, and N, respectively. This study reveals information about the interaction potential-DOS relationship in the Dirac materials.
Landau-quantized graphene (LQG) offers a magnetically controlled platform for manipulating coherent inter-Landau-level transitions of Dirac fermions. Such a platform provides compact control of terahertz and infrared photonic signals. Here, a closed-form susceptibility expression is derived using the density-matrix approach, where the real part of the susceptibility describes dispersion and the imaginary part describes absorption or gain. The numerical results show that tuning the control field modifies the probe response from a dispersive resonance regime to a transparency window and a gain-assisted response. The calculated group-index variation, approximately from 0.6 to 1.7, enables broad modulation of the probe group velocity, ranging from about 1.8 × 10 8 m/s to 5.2 × 10 8 m/s . The reduced-absorption region indicates an electromagnetically induced transparency response suitable for controlled probe-field transmission. Distinct spectral features are also observed in the absorption coefficient and electron energy-loss spectrum (ELS), indicating selective energy transfer near the LQG resonance and potential relevance for THz/IR modulation. In addition, the frequency-selective and sign-reversible photon-drag response suggests detuning-controlled optical momentum transfer. These tunable responses within the linear regime support LQG as a reconfigurable medium for quantum optical transport, synchronization, pulse routing, buffering, and chip-scale THz photonic interfaces.