This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.(November 2019) |
The term Dirac matter refers to a class of condensed matter systems which can be effectively described by the Dirac equation. Even though the Dirac equation itself was formulated for fermions, the quasi-particles present within Dirac matter can be of any statistics. As a consequence, Dirac matter can be distinguished in fermionic, bosonic or anyonic Dirac matter. Prominent examples of Dirac matter[1][2][3][4][5] are graphene and other Dirac semimetals, topological insulators, Weyl semimetals, various high-temperature superconductors with -wave pairing and liquid helium-3. The effective theory of such systems is classified by a specific choice of the Dirac mass, the Dirac velocity, the gamma matrices and the space-time curvature. The universal treatment of the class of Dirac matter in terms of an effective theory leads to a common features with respect to the density of states, the heat capacity and impurity scattering.