Discoveries of superfluid phases in 3He, high Tc superconductors, graphene and topological insulators have brought into focus materials where quasiparticles are described by same Dirac equation that governs behaviour of relativistic particles. This class of materials – Dirac materials – exhibits unusual universal features seen in numerous realizations: Klein tunnelling, chiral symmetries and impurity resonances. Research at Nordita has explored these similarities and discussed the unique role of symmetries that protect the Dirac spectrum, and how to control their properties. Modern tools have been used to design artificial Dirac Materials, for example Bosonic Dirac materials that host bosonic Dirac excitations, something that is not possible in particle physics where the Dirac excitations are fermionic.
Dirac matter is a general concept, the research pages provide more detail of the particular interests of the research group; a more general overview may be found on Wikipedia.
Research falls into several areas:
Pumped Dirac Materials: Pump-probe experiments have demonstrated that Dirac materials may be driven into transient excited states with two chemical potentials, one for the electrons and one for the holes, which effectively offers control of the strength of the Coulomb interaction.
Transport and other properties: The study of systems such as graphene and topological insulators with a view to their applications requires a detailed understanding of transport and quasi-particle properties even in equilibrium.
Review article
Dirac Materials
T.O. Wehling, A.M. Black-Schaffer, A.V. Balatsky
Advances in Physics, Vol. 63, Iss. 1 (2014)
arXiv:1405.5774
