Dynamical generation of topological masses in Dirac fermions

Abstract

© 2018 American Physical Society. We report the discovery of a topological Mott insulator in strongly correlated Dirac semimetals. Such an interaction-driven topological state has been theoretically proposed and is observed here with unbiased large-scale numerical simulations. In our model, interactions between electrons are mediated by Ising spins in a transverse field. The results indicate that the topological mass term is dynamically generated and the resulting quantum phase transition belongs to the (two-plus-one-dimensional) N=8 chiral Ising universality class. These conclusions stem from large-scale sign-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations.