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Published April 1, 2020 | Published
Journal Article Open

Interplay of interactions and disorder at the superfluid-insulator transition: A dirty two-dimensional quantum critical point

Abstract

We study the stability of the Wilson-Fisher fixed point of the quantum O(2N) vector model to quenched disorder in the large-N limit. While a random mass is strongly relevant at the Gaussian fixed point, its effect is screened by the strong interactions of the Wilson-Fisher fixed point. This enables a perturbative renormalization group study of the interplay of disorder and interactions about this fixed point. We show that, in contrast to the spiralling flows obtained in earlier double-ε expansions, the theory flows directly to a quantum critical point characterized by finite disorder and interactions. The critical exponents we obtain for this transition are in remarkable agreement with numerical studies of the superfluid-Mott glass transition. We additionally discuss the stability of this fixed point to scalar and vector potential disorder and use proposed boson-fermion dualities to make conjectures regarding the effects of weak disorder on dual Abelian Higgs and Chern-Simons-Dirac fermion theories when N = 1.

Additional Information

© 2020 American Physical Society. Received 23 October 2019; revised manuscript received 15 March 2020; accepted 16 March 2020; published 23 April 2020. We thank E. Fradkin, S. Hartnoll, Y.-B. Kim, S. Kivelson, S.-S. Lee, J. Maciejko, M. Mulligan, S. Raghu, G. Refael, S. Ryu, S. Sachdev, B. Spivak, T. Vojta, and S. Whitsitt for discussions. H.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1144245. L.N. is supported by the Kadanoff Fellowship from University of Chicago. Z.B. is supported through the Pappalardo Fellowship at MIT. A.T. acknowledges support from the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech and the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF1250. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611. Part of this work was initiated at KITP which is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958.

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August 19, 2023
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