Effective Lagrangian for the Macroscopic Motion of Weyl Fermions in 3He-A

Maik Selch, Mikhail Zubkov

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We consider the macroscopic motion of the normal component of superfluid 3He-A in global thermodynamic equilibrium within the context of the Zubarev statistical operator method. We formulate the corresponding effective theory in the language of the functional integral. The effective Lagrangian comprising macroscopic motion of fermionic excitations is calculated explicitly for the emergent relativistic fermions of the superfluid 3He-A phase immersed in a non-trivial bosonic background due to a space- and time-dependent matrix-valued vierbein featuring nonzero torsion as well as the Nieh–Yan anomaly. We do not consider the dynamics of the superfluid component itself and thereby its backreaction effects due to normal component macroscopic flow. It is treated as an external background within which the emergent relativistic fermions of the normal component move. The matrix-valued vierbein formulation comprises an additional two-dimensional internal spin space for the two axially charged Weyl fermions living at the Fermi points, which may be replaced by one featuring a Dirac fermion doublet with a real-valued vierbein, an axial Abelian gauge field, and a spin connection gauge field mixing the Dirac and internal spin spaces. We carry out this change of description in detail and determine the constraints on the superfluid background as well as the the normal component motion as determined from the Zubarev statistical operator formalism in global thermodynamic equilibrium. As an application of the developed theory, we consider macroscopic rotation around the axis of pure integer mass vortices. The corresponding thermodynamic quantities of the normal component are analyzed. Our formulation incorporates both superfluid background flow and macroscopic motion flow of the normal component and thereby enables an analysis of their interrelation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1045
JournalSymmetry
Volume17
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2025

Keywords

  • Zubarev statistical operator
  • emergent relativistic invariance
  • superfluidity in 3He

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