Interplay of topology and electron-electron interactions in Rarita-Schwinger-Weyl semimetals

Abstract

We study for the first time the effects of strong short-range electron-electron interactions in generic Rarita--Schwinger--Weyl semimetals hosting spin-3/2 electrons with linear dispersion at a four-fold band crossing point. The emergence of this novel quasiparticle, which is absent in high-energy physics, has recently been confirmed experimentally in the solid state. We combine symmetry considerations and a perturbative renormalization group analysis to discern three interacting phases that are prone to emerge in the strongly correlated regime: The chiral topological semimetal breaks a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetry and features four Weyl nodes of monopole charge +1 located at vertices of a tetrahedron in momentum space. The s-wave superconducting state opens a Majorana mass gap for the fermions and is the leading superconducting instability. The Weyl semimetal phase removes the fourfold degeneracy and creates two Weyl nodes with either equal or opposite chirality depending on the anisotropy of the band structure. We find that symmetry breaking occurs at weaker coupling if the total monopole charge remains constant across the transition.