UC Berkeley

Massless (2+1)D Dirac fermions arise in a variety of systems from graphene to the surfaces of topological insulators, where generating a mass is typically associated with breaking a symmetry. However, with strong interactions, a symmetric gapped phase can arise for multiples of eight Dirac fermions. A continuous quantum phase transition from the massless Dirac phase to this massive phase, which we term symmetric mass generation, is necessarily beyond the Landau paradigm and is hard to describe even at the conceptual level. Nevertheless, such transition has been consistently observed in several numerical studies recently. Here, we propose a theory for the symmetric mass generation transition which is reminiscent of deconfined criticality and involves emergent non-Abelian gauge fields coupled both to Dirac fermions and to critical Higgs bosons. We motivate the theory using an explicit parton construction and discuss predictions for numerics. Additionally, we show that the fermion Green's function is expected to undergo a zero-to-pole transition across the critical point.