Optical response of Luttinger semimetals in the normal and superconducting states

Abstract

We investigate the optical response properties of three-dimensional Luttinger semimetals with the Fermi energy close to a quadratic band touching point. In particular, in order to address recent experiments on the spectroscopy of pyrochlore iridates and half-Heusler superconductors, we derive expressions for the optical conductivity in both the normal and general superconducting states in the linear response regime within the random phase approximation. The response functions can be decomposed into contributions from intraband and interband transitions, the latter comprising a genuine signature of the quadratic band touching point. We demonstrate the importance of interband transitions in the optical response in the normal state both in the homogeneous and quasistatic limit. Our analysis reveals a factorization property of the homogeneous conductivity in the spatially anisotropic case and the divergence of the conductivity for strong spatial anisotropy. In the quasistatic limit, the response is dominated by interband transitions and significantly different from systems with a single parabolic band. As an applications of the formalism in the superconducting state we compute the optical conductivity and superfluid density for the s-wave singlet superconducting case for both finite and vanishing chemical potential.

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