No Arabic abstract
In materials chiral fermions such as Weyl fermions are characterized by nonzero chiral charges, which are singular points of Berry curvature in momentum space. Recently, new types of chiral fermions beyond Weyl fermions have been discovered in structurally chiral crystals CoSi, RhSi and PtAl. Here, we have synthesized RhSn single crystals, which have opposite structural chirality to the CoSi crystals we previously studied. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we show that the bulk electronic structures of RhSn are consistent with the band calculations and observe evident surface Fermi arcs and helical surface bands, confirming the existence of chiral fermions in RhSn. It is noteworthy that the helical surface bands of the RhSn and CoSi crystals have opposite handedness, meaning that the chiral fermions are reversed in the crystals of opposite structural chirality. Our discovery establishes a direct connection between chiral fermions in momentum space and chiral lattices in real space.
Weyl semimetals provide the realization of Weyl fermions in solid-state physics. Among all the physical phenomena that are enabled by Weyl semimetals, the chiral anomaly is the most unusual one. Here, we report signatures of the chiral anomaly in the magneto-transport measurements on the first Weyl semimetal TaAs. We show negative magnetoresistance under parallel electric and magnetic fields, that is, unlike most metals whose resistivity increases under an external magnetic field, we observe that our high mobility TaAs samples become more conductive as a magnetic field is applied along the direction of the current for certain ranges of the field strength. We present systematically detailed data and careful analyses, which allow us to exclude other possible origins of the observed negative magnetoresistance. Our transport data, corroborated by photoemission measurements, first-principles calculations and theoretical analyses, collectively demonstrate signatures of the Weyl fermion chiral anomaly in the magneto-transport of TaAs.
Topology concepts have significantly deepened of our understanding in recent years of the electronic properties of one-dimensional (1D) nano structures such as the graphene nanoribbons. Controlling topological electronic properties of GNRs has been demonstrated in both theoretical studies and experimental realization. Most previous works rely on classification theory requiring both time reversal and spatial symmetry of a unit cell in the 1D bulk material that is commensurate to its boundary. To access boundary structures that lead to unit cell with no spatial symmetry and to generalize the theory, we propose here another classification scheme, using chiral symmetry, to arrive at a Z classification that is not only applicable to GNRs with arbitrary terminations, but also to any general 1D chiral structures. This theory, combining with Liebs theorem, moreover enables access to the electrons spin degree of freedom, allowing for investigation of spin physics.
In this paper, the chiral Hall effect of strained Weyl semimetals without any external magnetic field is proposed. Electron-phonon coupling emerges in the low-energy fermionic sector through a pseudogauge potential. We show that, by using chiral kinetic theory, the chiral Hall effect appears as a response to a real time-varying electric field in the presence of structural distortion and it causes spatial chirality and charges separation in a Weyl system. We also show that the coupling of the electrons to acoustic phonons as a gapless excitation leads to emerging an optical absorption peak at $omega=omega_{el}$, where $omega_{el}$ is defined as a characteristic frequency associated with the pseudomagnetic field. We also propose the strain-induced planar Hall effect as another transport signature of the chiral-anomaly equation.
We report the experimental observation of strong electrical magneto-chiral anistropy (eMChA) in trigonal tellurium (t-Te) crystals. We introduce the tensorial character of the effect and determine several tensor elements and we propose a novel intrinsic bandstructure-based mechanism for eMChA which gives a reasonable description of the principal results.
The exchange coupling underlies ferroic magnetic coupling and is thus the key element that governs statics and dynamics of magnetic systems. This fundamental interaction comes in two flavors - symmetric and antisymmetric coupling. While symmetric coupling leads to ferro- and antiferromagnetism, antisymmetric coupling has attracted significant interest owing to its major role in promoting topologically non-trivial spin textures that promise high-speed and energy-efficient devices. So far, the antisymmetric exchange coupling rather short-ranged and limited to a single magnetic layer has been demonstrated, while the symmetric coupling also leads to long-range interlayer exchange coupling. Here, we report the missing component of the long-range antisymmetric interlayer exchange coupling in perpendicularly magnetized synthetic antiferromagnets with parallel and antiparallel magnetization alignments. Asymmetric hysteresis loops under an in-plane field unambiguously reveal a unidirectional and chiral nature of this novel interaction, which cannot be accounted for by existing coupling mechanisms, resulting in canted magnetization alignments. This can be explained by spin-orbit coupling combined with reduced symmetry in multilayers. This new class of chiral interaction provides an additional degree of freedom for engineering magnetic structures and promises to enable a new class of three-dimensional topological structures.