Lifshitz and Excited State Quantum Phase Transitions in Microwave Dirac Billiards

B. Dietz, M. Miski-Oglu, N. Pietralla, A. Richter, L. von Smekal, J. Wambach, F. Iachello

Published 2013-04-17, updated 2013-09-03Version 3

We present experimental results for the density of states (DOS) of a superconducting microwave Dirac billiard which serves as an idealized model for the electronic properties of graphene. The DOS exhibits two sharp peaks which evolve into van Hove singularities with increasing system size. They divide the band structure into regions governed by the \emph{relativistic} Dirac equation and by the \emph{non-relativistic} Schr\"odinger equation, respectively. We demonstrate that in the thermodynamic limit a topological transition appears as a neck-disrupting Lifshitz transition in the number susceptibility and as an excited state transition in the electronic excitations. Furthermore, we recover the finite-size scaling typical for excited state quantum phase transitions involving logarithmic divergences and identify a quasi-order parameter.