Local moment formation in Dirac electrons

Elemental bismuth and its compounds host strong spin-orbit interaction which is at the heart of topologically non-trivial alloys based on bismuth. These class of materials are described in terms of 4x4 matrices at each v point where spin and orbital labels of the underlying electrons are mixed. In this work we investigate the single impurity Anderson model (SIAM) within a mean field approximation to address the nature of local magnetic moment formation in a generic Dirac Hamiltonian. Despite the spin-mixing in the Hamiltonian, within the Hartree approximation it turns out that the impuritys Green function is diagonal in spin label. In the three dimensional Dirac materials defined over a bandwidth D and spin-orbit parameter γ, that hybridizes with impurity through V, a natural dimensionless parameter V²D/2πγ³ emerges. So neither the hybridization strength, V, nor the spin-orbit coupling γ, but a combination thereof governs the phase diagram. By tuning chemical potential and the impurity level, we present phase diagram for various values of Hubbard U. Numerical results suggest that strong spin-orbit coupling enhances the local moment formation both in terms of its strength and the area of the local moment region. In the case that we tune the chemical potential in a similar way as normal metal we find that magnetic region is confined to μ ≥ ε₀, in sharp contrast to 2D Dirac fermions. If one fixes the chemical potential and tunes the impurity level, phase diagram has two magnetic regions which corresponds to hybridization of impurity level with lower and upper bands.