Cavity-Induced Excitonic Insulation and Non-Fermi-Liquid Behavior in Dirac Materials
Abstract
We investigate two-dimensional Dirac fermions embedded in a deep-subwavelength cavity formed by high-impedance metasurfaces. We point out that, unlike conventional metallic boundaries, these metasurfaces support quasielectrostatic transverse-magnetic modes that mediate a long-range interaction between two-dimensional electrons. Combining static electronic screening with a Dyson-Schwinger analysis, we show that this engineered interaction can qualitatively alter the ground-state properties of Dirac materials. For a fermion flavor number Nf below a critical value Nc=16/π, the interaction drives an excitonic insulating phase through an infinite-order quantum phase transition and spontaneously generates a mass gap. At Nf>Nc, the system remains gapless but enters a non-Fermi-liquid critical regime where the quasiparticle residue is singularly suppressed to zero, and the Dirac cone exhibits a nonanalytic dispersion relation. Furthermore, under a perpendicular magnetic field, the cavity fluctuations dynamically lift the zeroth Landau level degeneracy across all Nf. These results identify high-impedance metasurface cavities as promising platforms for engineering correlated Dirac matter.
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