Fermion condensation induced by the Weyl anomaly
Chong-Sun Chu (National Center for Theoretical Sciences, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan, Department of Physics, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan); Rong-Xin Miao (School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China)
Fermi condensation is usually a phenomena of strongly correlated system. In this paper, we point out a novel mechanism for condensation of Dirac fermions due to the Weyl anomaly. The condensation has its physical origin in the nontrivial response of the fermion vacuum to changes in the background spacetime (either boundary location or the background metric), and can be felt when a background scalar field is turned on. The scalar field can be, for example, the Higgs field in a fundamental theory or the phonon in condensed matter system. For a spacetime with boundaries, the induced Fermi condensate is inversely proportional to the proper distance from the boundary. For a conformally flat spacetime without boundaries, Fermi condensation depends on the conformal factor and its derivatives. We also generalize the Banks-Casher relation which relates the Fermi condensate to the zero mode density of the Dirac operator to a local form. Due to its universal nature, this anomaly induced Fermi condensate can be expected to have a wide range of applications in physics.
