Novel criticality of Dirac fermions in the presence of emergent gauge fields

Abstract: We consider spontaneous symmetry breaking transitions of strongly interacting two-dimensional Dirac fermions minimally coupled to mass and emergent gauge field order parameters. Using a renormalization group analysis, we show that the presence of gauge fields leads to novel fermion induced quantum (multi-)criticality where the putative emergent Lorentz invariance is violated. We illustrate this with the example of translational symmetry breaking due to charge-density wave order on the honeycomb lattice. Finally, we identify that topological phase transitions are well described by this effective field theory.