No Arabic abstract
Weyl semimetals have been intensely studied as a three dimensional realization of a Dirac-like excitation spectrum where the conduction bands and valence bands touch at isolated Weyl points in momentum space. Like in graphene, this property entails various peculiar electronic properties. However, recent theoretical studies have suggested that resonant scattering from rare regions can give rise to a non-zero density of states even at charge neutrality. Here, we give a detailed account of this effect and demonstrate how the semimetallic nature is suppressed at the lowest scales. To this end, we develop a self-consistent T-matrix approach to investigate the density of states beyond the limit of weak disorder. Our results show a nonvanishing density of states at the Weyl point which exhibits a non-analytic dependence on the impurity density. This unusually strong effect of rare regions leads to a revised estimate for the conductivity close to the Weyl point and emphasizes possible deviations from semimetallic behavior in dirty Weyl semimetals at charge neutrality even with very low impurity concentration.
We study the dynamics of Dirac and Weyl electrons in disordered point-node semimetals. The ballistic feature of the transport is demonstrated by simulating the wave-packet dynamics on lattice models. We show that the ballistic transport survives under a considerable strength of disorder up to the semimetal-metal transition point, which indicates the robustness of point-node semimetals against disorder. We also visualize the robustness of the nodal points and linear dispersion under broken translational symmetry. The speed of the wave packets slows down with increasing disorder strength, and vanishes toward the critical strength of disorder, hence becoming the order parameter. The obtained critical behavior of the speed of the wave packets is consistent with that predicted by the scaling conjecture.
Energy transfer from electrons to phonons is an important consideration in any Weyl or Dirac semimetal based application. In this work, we analytically calculate the cooling power of acoustic phonons, i.e. the energy relaxation rate of electrons which are interacting with acoustic phonons, for Weyl and Dirac semimetals in a variety of different situations. For cold Weyl or Dirac semimetals with the Fermi energy at the nodal points, we find the electronic temperature, $T_e$, decays in time as a power law. In the heavily doped regime, $T_e$ decays linearly in time far away from equilibrium. In a heavily doped system with short-range disorder we predict the cooling power of acoustic phonons is drastically increased because of an enhanced energy transfer between electrons and phonons. When an external magnetic field is applied to an undoped system, the cooling power is linear in magnetic field strength and $T_e$ has square root decay in time, independent of magnetic field strength over a range of values.
We report on a fully self-consistent Hartree-Fock calculation of interaction effects on the Moire flat bands of twisted bilayer graphene, assuming that valley U(1) symmetry is respected. We use realistic band structures and interactions and focus on the charge neutrality point, where experiments have variously reported either insulating or semimetallic behavior. Restricting the search to orders for which the valley U(1) symmetry remains unbroken, we find three types of self-consistent solutions with competitive ground state energy (i) insulators that break $C_2 {mathcal T}$ symmetry, including valley Chern insulators (ii) spin or valley polarized insulators and (iii) rotation $C_3$ symmetry breaking semimetals whose gaplessness is protected by the topology of the Moire flat bands. We find that the relative stability of these states can be tuned by weak strains that break $C_3$ rotation. The nematic semimetal and also, somewhat unexpectedly, the $C_2 {mathcal T}$ breaking insulators, are stabilized by weak strain. These ground states may be related to the semi-metallic and insulating behaviors seen at charge neutrality, and the sample variability of their observation. We also compare with the results of STM measurements near charge neutrality.
We study both noncentrosymmetric and time-reversal breaking Weyl semimetal systems under a strong magnetic field with the Coulomb interaction. The three-dimensional bulk system is reduced to many mutually interacting quasi-one-dimensional wires. Each strongly correlated wire can be approached within the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid formalism. Including impurity scatterings, we inspect the localization effect and the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity. The effect of a large number of Weyl points in real materials is also discussed.
We study the electronic contribution to the thermal conductivity and the thermopower of Weyl and Dirac semimetals using a semiclassical Boltzmann approach. We investigate the effect of various relaxation processes including disorder and interactions on the thermoelectric properties, and also consider doping away from the Weyl or Dirac point. We find that the thermal conductivity and thermopower have an interesting dependence on the chemical potential that is characteristic of the linear electronic dispersion, and that the electron-electron interactions modify the Lorenz number. For the interacting system, we also use the Kubo formalism to obtain the transport coefficients. We find exact agreement between the Kubo and Boltzmann approaches at high temperatures. We also consider the effect of electric and magnetic fields on the thermal conductivity in various orientations with respect to the temperature gradient. Notably, when the temperature gradient and magnetic field are parallel, we find a large contribution to the longitudinal thermal conductivity that is quadratic in the magnetic field strength, similar to the magnetic field dependence of the longitudinal electrical conductivity due to the presence of the chiral anomaly when no thermal gradient is present.