Massive Dirac fermions from holography

Abstract

We provide a framework to compute the dynamics of massive Dirac fermions using holography. To this end we consider two bulk Dirac fermions that are coupled via a Yukawa interaction and propagate on a gravitational background in which a mass deformation is introduced. Moreover, we discuss the incorporation of this approach in semiholography. The resulting undoped fermionic spectral functions indeed show that the Yukawa coupling induces a gap in the holographic spectrum, whereas the semiholographic extension is in general gapped but additionally contains a quantum critical point at which the effective fermion mass vanishes and a topological phase transition occurs. Furthermore, when introducing doping, the fermionic spectral functions show a quantum phase transition between a gapped material and a Fermi liquid.