Classification of electronic nematicity in three-dimensional crystals and quasicrystals

Abstract

Electronic nematic order has been reported in a rich landscape of materials, encompassing not only a range of intertwined correlated and topological phenomena, but also different underlying lattice symmetries. Motivated by these findings, we investigate the behavior of electronic nematicity as the spherical symmetry of three-dimensional (3D) space is systematically lowered by the lattice environment. We consider all 32 crystallographic point groups as well as 4 major classes of quasicrystalline point groups, given the recent observations of electronic phases of interest in quasicrystalline materials and artificial twisted quasicrystals. Valuable insights are gained by establishing a mapping between the five-component charge-quadrupolar nematic order parameter of the electronic fluid and the 3D tensorial order parameter of nematic liquid crystals. We find that a uniaxial nematic state is only generically realized in polyhedral point groups (icosahedral and cubic), with the nematic director pointing along different sets of rotational symmetry axes. Interestingly, icosahedral point groups are the only ones in which the five nematic order parameter components transform as the same irreducible representation, making them the closest analog of 3D isotropic nematics. In axial point groups, one of the nematic components is always condensed, whereas the other four components decompose into an in-plane and an out-of-plane nematic doublet, resulting in biaxial nematic ground states. Because these two nematic doublets behave as $Z_q$-clock order parameters, this allows us to identify the types of crystals and quasicrystals that can host interesting electronic nematic phenomena enabled by the critical properties of the $q\geq 4$ clock model, such as emergent continuous nematic fluctuations in 3D, critical phases with quasi-long-range nematic order in 2D, and Ashkin-Teller nematicity in 2D.