We study a lattice model of interacting Dirac fermions in
(2+1) dimensions space-time with an SU(4) symmetry. While increasing the interaction strength, this model undergoes a continuous quantum phase transition from a weakly interacting Dirac semimetal to a fully gapped and nondegenerate phase without condensing any Dirac fermion bilinear mass operator. This unusual mechanism for mass generation is consistent with recent studies of interacting topological insulators/superconductors, and also consistent with recent progress in the lattice QCD community.
We use determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations to study the role of electron-electron interactions on three-dimensional (3D) Dirac fermions based on the $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux model on a cubic lattice. We show that the Hubbard interaction drives the 3D Dirac semimetal to an antiferromagnetic (AF) insulator only above a finite critical interaction strength and the long-range AF order persists up to a finite temperature. We evaluate the critical interaction strength and temperatures using finite-size scaling of the spin structure factor. The critical behaviors are consistent with the (3+1)-dimensional Gross-Neveu universality class for the quantum critical point and 3D Heisenberg universality class for the thermal phase transitions. We further investigate correlation effects in the birefringent Dirac fermion system. It is found that the critical interaction strength
Uc is decreased by reducing the velocity of the Dirac cone, quantifying the effect of velocity on the critical interaction strength in 3D Dirac fermion systems. Our findings unambiguously uncover correlation effects in 3D Dirac fermions and may be observed using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice.
Two-dimensional semi-Dirac fermions are quasiparticles that disperse linearly in one direction and quadratically in the other. We investigate instabilities of semi-Dirac fermions toward charge and spin density wave and superconducting orders, driven by short-range interactions. We analyze the critical behavior of the Yukawa theories for the different order parameters using Wilson momentum shell renormalization group. We generalize to a large number
Nf of fermion flavors to achieve analytic control in
2+1 dimensions and calculate critical exponents at one-loop order, systematically including
1/Nf corrections. The latter depend on the specific form of the bosonic infrared propagator in
2+1 dimensions, which needs to be included to regularize divergencies. The
1/Nf corrections are surprisingly small, suggesting that the expansion is well controlled in the physical dimension. The order parameter correlations inherit the electronic anisotropy of the semi-Dirac fermions, leading to correlation lengths that diverge along the spatial directions with distinct exponents, even at the mean-field level. We conjecture that the proximity to the critical point may stabilize novel modulated order phases.