No Arabic abstract
Since the early days of Dirac flux quantization, magnetic monopoles have been sought after as a potential corollary of quantized electric charge. As opposed to magnetic monopoles embedded into the theory of electromagnetism, Weyl crystals exhibit Berry flux monopoles in reciprocal parameter space. As a function of crystal momentum, such monopoles locate at the degeneracy point of the Weyl cone. Here, we report momentum-resolved spectroscopic signatures of Berry flux monopoles in TaAs as a paradigmatic Weyl semimetal. We have probed the orbital and spin angular momentum (OAM and SAM) of the Weyl-fermion states by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy at bulk-sensitive soft X-ray energies (SX-ARPES) combined with photoelectron spin detection and circular dichroism. Supported by first-principles calculations, our measurements image characteristics of a topologically non-trivial winding of the OAM at the Weyl nodes and unveil a chirality-dependent SAM of the Weyl bands. Our results experimentally visualize the non-trivial momentum-space topology in a Weyl semimetal, promising to have profound implications for the study of quantum-geometric effects in solids.
We study the effects of momentum relaxation on the holographic Weyl semimetal which exhibits a topological quantum phase transition between the Weyl semimetal phase and a topological trivial phase. The conservation of momentum in the field theory is broken by the axion fields in holography. The topological Weyl semimetal phase is characterized by a nontrivial anomalous Hall conductivity. We find that the critical value of the phase transition decreases when we increase the momentum relaxation strength up to a special value, above which it goes to zero. This indicates that the Weyl semimetal phase shrinks and finally disappears as the momentum relaxation strength is increased, which is consistent with the weakly coupled field theory predictions. We also study the behavior of transverse/longitudinal conductivities and low temperature dependence of the d.c.resistivities with respect to momentum relaxation strength.
The subject of topological materials has attracted immense attention in condensed-matter physics, because they host new quantum states of matter containing Dirac, Majorana, or Weyl fermions. Although Majorana fermions can only exist on the surface of topological superconductors, Dirac and Weyl fermions can be realized in both 2D and 3D materials. The latter are semimetals with Dirac/Weyl cones either not tilted (type I) or tilted (type II). Although both Dirac and Weyl fermions have massless nature with the nontrivial Berry phase, the formation of Weyl fermions in 3D semimetals require either time-reversal or inversion symmetry breaking to lift degeneracy at Dirac points. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that canted antiferromagnetic BaMnSb2 is a 3D Weyl semimetal with a 2D electronic structure. The Shubnikov-de Hass oscillations of the magnetoresistance give nearly zero effective mass with high mobility and the nontrivial Berry phase. The ordered magnetic arrangement (ferromagnetic ordering in the ab plane and antiferromagnetic ordering along the c axis below 286 K) breaks the time-reversal symmetry, thus offering us an ideal platform to study magnetic Weyl fermions in a centrosymmetric material.
We present a systematic study of both the temperature and frequency dependence of the optical response in TaAs, a material that has recently been realized to host the Weyl semimetal state. Our study reveals that the optical conductivity of TaAs features a narrow Drude response alongside a conspicuous linear dependence on frequency. The width of the Drude peak decreases upon cooling, following a $T^{2}$ temperature dependence which is expected for Weyl semimetals. Two linear components with distinct slopes dominate the 5-K optical conductivity. A comparison between our experimental results and theoretical calculations suggests that the linear conductivity below $sim$230~cm$^{-1}$ is a clear signature of the Weyl points lying in very close proximity to the Fermi energy.
An ideal Weyl semimetal with a single pair of Weyl points (WPs) may be generated by splitting a single Dirac point (DP) through the breaking of time-reversal symmetry by magnetic order. However, most known Dirac semimetals possess a pair of DPs along an axis that is protected by crystalline symmetry. Here, we demonstrate that a single pair of WPs may also be generated from a pair of DPs. Using first-principles band structure calculations, we show that inducing ferromagnetism in the AFM Dirac semimetal EuCd2As2 generates a single pair of WPs due to its half-metallic nature. Analysis with a low-energy effective Hamiltonian shows that this ideal Weyl semimetal is obtained in EuCd2As2 because the DPs are very close to the zone center and the ferromagnetic exchange splitting is large enough to push one pair of WPs to merge and annihilate at Gamma while the other pair survives. Furthermore, we predict that alloying with Ba at the Eu site can stabilize the ferromagnetic configuration and generate a single pair of Weyl points without application of a magnetic field.
We report a polarized Raman study of Weyl semimetal TaAs. We observe all the optical phonons, with energies and symmetries consistent with our first-principles calculations. We detect additional excitations assigned to multiple-phonon excitations. These excitations are accompanied by broad peaks separated by 140~cm$^{-1}$ that are also most likely associated with multiple-phonon excitations. We also noticed a sizable B$_1$ component for the spectral background, for which the origin remains unclear.