Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Disordered Dirac Fermions

Rahul Nandkishore

University of Colorado

I discuss the behavior of three dimensional Dirac fermions with scalar potential disorder. I show that disorder controls the universal behavior at the Dirac point, even though perturbative arguments suggest disorder is an irrelevant perturbation. The effect of disorder is encoded in `instanton’ contributions that are overlooked by standard disorder averaged calculations. I discuss the implications for transport in 3D Dirac materials, and some open problems.

Ref: R. Nandkishore. D.A. Huse and S.L. Sondhi, Phys. Rev. B 89, 245110 (2014)