Disorder Operator and Renyi Entanglement Entropy of Symmetric Mass Generation

Abstract

<p>The “symmetric mass generation” (SMG) quantum phase transition discovered in recent years has attracted great interest from both condensed matter and high energy theory communities. Here, interacting Dirac fermions acquire a gap without condensing any fermion bilinear mass term or any concomitant spontaneous symmetry breaking. It is hence beyond the conventional Gross-Neveu-Yukawa-Higgs paradigm. One important question we address in this Letter is whether the SMG transition corresponds to a true unitary conformal field theory. We employ the sharp diagnosis including the scaling of disorder operator and Rényi entanglement entropy in large-scale lattice model quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Our results strongly suggest that the SMG transition is indeed an unconventional quantum phase transition and it should correspond to a true (2+1)⁢𝑑 unitary conformal field theory.<br></p>