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Relevance of disorder for dirac fermions with imaginary vector potentials
1Newman Laboratory, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
Physical Review Letters
|October 4, 2000
Summary
We studied disorder effects in Dirac Hamiltonians using imaginary vector potentials. Two universality classes emerged, with gauge fields potentially irrelevant to impurity disorder.
Area of Science:
- Condensed matter physics
- Quantum field theory
Background:
- Disorder is crucial in condensed matter systems.
- Dirac-like Hamiltonians describe various physical phenomena.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate disorder effects in Dirac-like systems.
- Apply conformal field theory techniques.
- Analyze the role of imaginary vector potentials.
Main Methods:
- Theoretical analysis using conformal field theory.
- Consideration of disorder in an imaginary vector potential.
- Calculation of lowest order beta functions.
Main Results:
- Identified two distinct universality classes.
- Demonstrated that gauge field disorder can influence impurity disorder.
- Showed that in one class, gauge fields render all disorder irrelevant.
Conclusions:
- Imaginary vector potentials are key for CFT analysis of disorder.
- The interplay between gauge and impurity disorder defines universality classes.