arXiv subjects

Andreas Sinner

Publications and source records attributed to Andreas Sinner.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Designing Moir\'e Patterns by Strain

Experiments conducted on two-dimensional twisted materials have revealed a plethora of moir\'e patterns with different forms and shapes. The formation of these patterns is usually attributed to the presence of small strains in the samples, which typically arise during their fabrication. In this work we find that the superlattice structure of such systems actually depends crucially on the interplay between twist and strain. For systems composed of honeycomb lattices, we show that this can lead to the formation of practically any moir\'e geometry, even if each lattice is only slightly distorted. As a result, we show that under strain the moir\'e Brillouin zone is not a stretched irregular hexagon, but rather a primitive cell that changes according to the geometry of the strained moir\'e vectors. We identify the conditions for the formation of hexagonal moir\'e patterns arising solely due to shear or biaxial strain, thus opening the possibility of engineering moir\'e patterns solely by strain. Moreover, we study the electronic properties in such moir\'e patterns and find that the strain tends to suppress the formation of the flat moir\'e bands, even in the strain-induced hexagonal patterns analogous to those obtained by the twist only. Our work explains the plethora of moir\'e patterns observed in experiments, and provides a solid theoretical foundation from which one can design moir\'e patterns by strain.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2022

Strain induced quasi-unidimensional channels in twisted moir\'e lattices

We study the effects of strain in moir\'e systems composed of honeycomb lattices. We elucidate the formation of almost perfect one-dimensional moir\'e patterns in twisted bilayer systems. The formation of such patterns is a consequence of an interplay between twist and strain which gives rise to a collapse of the reciprocal space unit cell. As a criterion for such collapse we find a simple relation between the two quantities and the material specific Poisson ratio. The induced one dimensional behavior is characterized by two, usually incommensurate, periodicities. Our results offer explanations for the complex patterns of one-dimensional channels observed in low angle twisted bilayer graphene systems and twisted bilayer dicalcogenides. Our findings can be applied to any hexagonal twisted moir\'e pattern and can be easily extended to other geometries.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2022

Diffusive transport in the lowest Landau level of disordered 2d semimetals: the mean-square-displacement approach

We study the electronic transport in the lowest Landau level of disordered two-dimensional semimetals placed in a homogeneous perpendicular magnetic field. The material system is modeled by the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang Hamiltonian, which has zero energy Landau modes due to the material's intrinsic Berry curvature. These turn out to be crucially important for the density of states and the static conductivity of the disordered system. We develop an analytical approach to the diffusion and conductivity based on a self-consistent equation of motion for the mean squared displacement. The obtained value of the zero mode conductivity is close to the conductivity of disordered Dirac electrons without magnetic fields, which have zero energy points in the spectrum as well. Our analysis is applicable in a broader context of disordered two-dimensional electron gases in strong magnetic fields.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Electron pairing with gapless excitations in mixed double layers

We study the interlayer pairing states in layered systems of two different 2d electronic subsystems, one with relativistic linear and the other with non-relativistic parabolic spectrum. The complex order parameter of the paired state has a two component structure. We investigate the pairing state formation on the mean-field level, determine the critical interaction strength and evaluate the effective potential. The anisotropic three-band spectrum of quasiparticles depends explicitly on the phase difference of the order parameter components, rotates in momentum space as it changes. It is subject to the strong band deformation due to the pairing. It leads to the fusion and hybridization of initially decoupled bands. The quasiparticle spectrum has the shape of deformed Dirac cones in the vicinity of the two touching points between neighboring bands. The density of states exhibits a number of specific features due to band deformation, such as a van Hove singularity.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Pairing transition in a double layer with interlayer Coulomb repulsion

We study the effect of interlayer Coulomb interaction in an electronic double layer. Assuming that each of the layers consists of a bipartite lattice, a sufficiently strong interlayer interaction leads to an interlayer pairing of electrons with a staggered order parameter. We show that the correlated pairing state is dual to the excitonic pairing state with uniform order parameter in an electron-hole double layer. The interlayer pairing of electrons leads to strong current-current correlations between the layers. We also analyze the interlayer conductivity and the fluctuations of the order parameter, which consists of a gapped and a gapless mode.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Deformation of graphene sheet: Interaction of fermions with phonons

We construct an effective low energy Hamiltonian which describes fermions dwelling on a deformed honeycomb lattice with dislocations and disclinations, and with an arbitrary hopping parameters of the corresponding tight binding model. It describes the interaction of fermions with a 2d gravity and has also a local SU(2) gauge invariance of the group of rotations. We reformulate the model as interaction of fermions with the deformation of the lattice, which forms a phonon field. We calculate the response of fermion currents to the external deformation or phonon field, which is a result of a Z_2 anomaly. This can be detected experimentally.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Quantum Hall effect induced by electron-phonon interaction

When phonons couple to fermions in 2D semimetals, the interaction may turn the system into an insulator. There are several insulating phases in which the time reversal and the sublattice symmetries are spontaneously broken. Examples are many-body states commensurate to Haldane's staggered flux model or to lattice models with periodically modulated strain. We find that the effective field theories of these phases exhibit characteristic Chern-Simons terms, whose coefficients are related to the topological invariants of the microscopic model. This implies that the corresponding quantized Hall conductivities characterize these insulating states.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Spontaneous mass generation due to phonons in a two-dimensional Dirac fermion system

Fermions with one and two Dirac nodes are coupled to in-plane phonons to study a spontaneous transition into the Hall insulating phase. At sufficiently strong electron-phonon interaction a gap appears in the spectrum of fermions, signaling a transition into a phase with spontaneously broken parity and time-reversal symmetry. The structure of elementary excitations above the gap in the corresponding phase reveals the presence of scale invariant parity breaking terms which resemble Chern-Simons excitations. Evaluating the Kubo formula for both models we find quantized Hall plateaux in each case, with conductance of binodal model exactly twice as large as of the mononodal model.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Tunable transmittance in anisotropic 2D materials

A uniaxial strain applied to graphene-like materials moves the Dirac nodes along the boundary of the Brillouin zone. An extreme case is the merging of the Dirac node positions to a single degenerate spectral node which gives rise to a new topological phase. Then isotropic Dirac nodes are replaced by a node with a linear behavior in one and a parabolic behavior in the other direction. This anisotropy influences substantially the optical properties. We propose a method to determine characteristic spectral and transport properties in black phosphorus layers which were recently studied by several groups with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and discuss how the transmittance, the reflectance and the optical absorption of this material can be tuned. In particular, we demonstrate that the transmittance of linearly polarized incident light varies from nearly 0\% to almost 100\% in the microwave and far-infrared regime.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

Conductivity of disordered 2d binodal Dirac electron gas: Effect of the internode scattering

We study the dc conductivity of a weakly disordered 2d Dirac electron gas with two bands and two spectral nodes, employing a field theoretical version of the Kubo--Greenwood conductivity formula. In this paper we are concerned with the question how the internode scattering affects the conductivity. We use and compare two established techniques for treating the disorder scattering: The perturbation theory, there ladder and maximally crossed diagrams are summed up, and the functional integral approach. Both turn out to be entirely equivalent. For a large number of random potential configurations we have found only two different conductivity scenarios. Both scenarios appear independently of whether the disorder does or does not create the internode scattering. In particular we do not confirm the conjecture that the internode scattering tends to Anderson localization.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2016

Finite-size scaling in a 2D disordered electron gas with spectral nodes

We study the DC conductivity of a weakly disordered 2D electron gas with two bands and spectral nodes, employing the field theoretical version of the Kubo--Greenwood conductivity formula. Disorder scattering is treated within the standard perturbation theory by summing up ladder and maximally crossed diagrams. The emergent gapless (diffusion) modes determine the behavior of the conductivity on large scales. We find a finite conductivity with an intermediate logarithmic finite-size scaling towards smaller conductivities but do not obtain the logarithmically divergence of the weak-localization approach. Our results agree with the experimentally observed logarithmic scaling of the conductivity in graphene with the formation of a plateau near $e^2/πh$.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2016

Emergent Chern-Simons excitations due to electron--phonon interaction

We address the problem of Dirac fermions interacting with longitudinal phonons. A gap in the spectrum of fermions leads to the emergence of the Chern--Simons excitations in the spectrum of phonons. We study the effect of those excitations on observable quantities: the phonon dispersion, the phonon spectral density, and the Hall conductivity.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2014

Two-parameter scaling theory of transport near a spectral node

We investigate the finite-size scaling behavior of the conductivity in a two-dimensional Dirac electron gas within a chiral sigma model. Based on the fact that the conductivity is a function of system size times scattering rate, we obtain a two-parameter scaling flow toward a finite fixed point. The latter is the minimal conductivity of the infinite system. Depending on boundary conditions, we also observe unstable fixed points with conductivities much larger than the experimentally observed values, which may account for results found in some numerical simulations. By including a spectral gap we extend our scaling approach to describe a metal-insulator transition.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2014

Linear response peculiarity of a two--dimensional Dirac electron gas at weak scattering

The conductivity of an electron gas can be alternatively calculated either from the current--current or from the density--density correlation function. Here, we compare these two frequently used formulations of the Kubo formula for the two--dimensional Dirac electron gas by direct evaluations for several special cases. Assuming the presence of weak disorder we investigate perturbatively both formulas at and away from the Dirac point. While to zeroth order in the disorder amplitude both formulations give identical results, with some very strong assumptions though, they show significant discrepancies already in first order. At half filling we evaluate all second order diagrams. Virtually none of the topologically identical diagrams yield the same corrections for both formulations. We conclude that a direct comparison of conductivities of disordered system calculated in both formulas is not possible.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2012

Renormalized transport properties of randomly gapped 2D Dirac fermions

We investigate the scaling properties of the recently acquired fermionic non--linear $σ$--model which controls gapless diffusive modes in a two--dimensional disordered system of Dirac electrons beyond charge neutrality. The transport on large scales is governed by a novel renormalizable nonlocal field theory. For zero mean random gap, it is characterized by the absence of a dynamic gap generation and a scale invariant diffusion coefficient. The $β$ function of the DC conductivity, computed for this model, is in perfect agreement with numerical results obtained previously.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2011

Perturbative analysis of the conductivity in disordered monolayer and bilayer graphene

The DC conductivity of monolayer and bilayer graphene is studied perturbatively for different types of disorder. In the case of monolayer, an exact cancellation of logarithmic divergences occurs for all disorder types. The total conductivity correction for a random vector potential is zero, while for a random scalar potential and a random gap it acquires finite corrections. We identify the diagrams which are responsible for these corrections and extrapolate the finite contributions to higher orders which gives us general expressions for the conductivity of weakly disordered monolayer graphene. In the case of bilayer graphene, a cancellation of all contributions for all types of disorder takes place. Thus, the minimal conductivity of bilayer graphene turns out to be very robust against disorder.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2010

Effect of Coulomb interaction on the gap in monolayer and bilayer graphene

We study effects of a repulsive Coulomb interaction on the spectral gap in monolayer and bilayer graphene in the vicinity of the charge neutrality point by employing the functional renormalization-group technique. In both cases Coulomb interaction supports the gap once it is open. For monolayer graphene we correctly reproduce results obtained previously by several authors, e.g., an apparent logarithmic divergence of the Fermi velocity and the gap as well as a fixed point corresponding to a quantum phase transition at infinitely large Coulomb interaction. On the other hand, we show that the gap introduces an additional length scale at which renormalization flow of diverging quantities saturates. An analogous analysis is also performed for bilayer graphene with similar results. We find an additional fixed point in the gapless regime with linear spectrum corresponding to the vanishing electronic band mass. This fixed point is unstable with respect to gap fluctuations and can not be reached as soon as the gap is opened. This preserves the quadratic scaling of the spectrum and finite electronic band mass.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2010

Functional renormalization group approach to interacting bosons at zero temperature

We investigate the single-particle spectral density of interacting bosons within the non-perturbative functional renormalization group technique. The flow equations for a Bose gas are derived in a scheme which treats the two-particle density-density correlations exactly but neglects irreducible correlations among three and more particles. These flow equations are solved within a truncation which allows to extract the complete frequency and momentum structure of the normal and anomalous self-energies. Both the asymptotic small momentum regime, where perturbation regime fails, as well as the perturbative regime at larger momenta are well described within a single unified approach. The self-energies do not exhibit any infrared divergences, satisfy the U(1) symmetry constraints, and are in accordance with the Nepomnyashchy relation which states that the anomalous self-energy vanishes at zero momentum and zero frequency. From the self-energies we extract the single-particle spectral density of the two-dimensional Bose gas. The dispersion is found to be of the Bogoliubov form and shows the crossover from linear Goldstone modes to the quadratic behavior of quasi-free bosons. The damping of the quasiparticles is found to be in accordance with the standard Beliaev damping. We furthermore recover the exact asymptotic limit of the propagators derived by Gavoret and Nozieres and discuss the nature of the non-analyticities of the self-energies in the very small momentum regime.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗