Survival of sharp $n=0$ Landau levels in massive tilted Dirac fermions: Protection by generalized chiral operator

Abstract

Anomalously sharp (delta-function-like) $n=0$ Landau level in the presence of disorder is usually considered to be a manifestation of the massless Dirac fermions in magnetic fields. This property persists even when the Dirac cone is tilted, which has been shown by Kawarabayashi et al. [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 83}, 153414 (2011)] to be a consequence of a "generalized chiral symmetry". Here we pose a question whether this property will be washed out when the tilted Dirac fermion becomes massive. Surprisingly, the levels persist to be delta-function-like, although the mass term that splits $n=0$ Landau levels may seem to degrade the anomalous sharpness. This has been shown both numerically for a tight-binding model, and analytically in terms of the Aharonov-Casher argument extended to the massive tilted Dirac fermions. A key observation is that, while the generalized chiral symmetry is broken by the mass term, the $n=0$ Landau level remains to accommodate eigenstates of the generalized chiral operator, resulting in the robustness against chiral-symmetric disorders. Mathematically, the conventional and generalized chiral operators are related with each other via a non-unitary transformation, with which the split, nonzero-energy $n=0$ wave functions of the massive system are just gauge-transformed zero-mode wave functions of the massless system. A message is that the chiral symmetry, rather than a simpler notion of the sublattice symmetry, is essential for the robustness of the $n=0$ Landau level.