Marginal Fermi liquid versus excitonic instability in 3D Dirac semimetals

J. Gonzalez

Published 2014-02-27, updated 2014-09-12Version 3

We study the different phases in the Quantum Electrodynamics of 3D Dirac semimetals depending on the number $N$ of Dirac fermions, using renormalization group methods and the self-consistent resolution of the Schwinger-Dyson equation. We find that, for $N < 4$, a phase with dynamical generation of mass prevails at sufficiently strong coupling, sharing the same physics of the excitonic instability in 2D Dirac semimetals. For $N \geq 4$, we show that the phase diagram has instead a line of critical points characterized by the suppression of the quasiparticle weight at low energies, making the system to fall into the class of marginal Fermi liquids. Such a boundary marks the transition to a kind of strange metal which can be still defined in terms of electron quasiparticles, but with parameters that have large imaginary parts implying an increasing deviation from the conventional Fermi liquid picture.