Soft Modes and Nonanalyticities in a Clean Dirac Metal

Abstract

We consider the effects of the electron-electron interaction in a clean Dirac metal, i.e., a Dirac system with the chemical potential not tuned to the Dirac point. We introduce the notion of a Dirac Fermi liquid (DFL) and discuss the soft two-particle excitations in such systems, which are qualitatively different from the corresponding excitations in a conventional, or Landau, Fermi liquid (LFL). These soft excitations lead to nonanalytic dependencies of observables, including the density of states, the spin susceptibility, and the specific heat, on the temperature, magnetic field, and wave number, which first appear at second order in the interaction. We determine and discuss the nature of these nonanalyticities in a DFL and compare them with the corresponding effects in a LFL. Our results are based on very general arguments regarding the existence and nature of the soft modes, and corroborated by explicit perturbative calculations. We also discuss their consequences for magnetic quantum phase transitions in Dirac metals.