Fermi arcs and surface criticality in dirty Dirac materials

Abstract

We study the effects of disorder on semi-infinite Weyl and Dirac semimetals where the presence of a boundary leads to the formation of either Fermi arcs/rays or Dirac surface states. Using a local version of the self-consistent Born approximation, we calculate the profile of the local density of states and the surface group velocity. This allows us to explore the full phase diagram as a function of boundary conditions and disorder strength. While in all cases we recover the sharp criticality in the bulk, we unveil a critical behavior at the surface of Dirac semimetals, which is smoothed out by Fermi arcs in Weyl semimetals.