Nonadiabatic transition at a band-touching point

Abstract: Low-energy Hamiltonians with a linear crossing in their energy dispersion (dubbed Dirac Hamiltonians) have recently been the subject of intense investigations. The linear dispersion is often the result of an approximation in the energy dispersion at the band-touching point in which higher order terms are discarded. In this paper, we show that, in terms of nonadiabatic transitions, by passing through a touching point, certain types of quadratic terms could not be omitted, even in the arbitrary vicinity of it, ie, quadratic terms could significantly affect the transition probability, hence the Hamiltonian is not reducible to a linear one. We further show that the presence of terms with exponents larger than two only affects the transition probability away from the touching point. In the end, we discuss conditions that may lead to the appearance of oscillations in the transition probability profile.