Surface Luttinger arcs in Weyl semimetals


Abstract in English

The surface of a Weyl semimetal famously hosts an exotic topological metal that contains open Fermi arcs rather than closed Fermi surfaces. In this work, we show that the surface is also endowed with a feature normally associated with strongly interacting systems, namely, Luttinger arcs, defined as zeros of the electron Greens function. The Luttinger arcs connect surface projections of Weyl nodes of opposite chirality and form closed loops with the Fermi arcs when the Weyl nodes are undoped. Upon doping, the ends of the Fermi and Luttinger arcs separate and the intervening regions get filled by surface projections of bulk Fermi surfaces. For bilayered Weyl semimetals, we prove two remarkable implications: (i) the precise shape of the Luttinger arcs can be determined experimentally by removing a surface layer. We use this principle to sketch the Luttinger arcs for Co and Sn terminations in Co$_{3}$Sn$_{2}$S$_{2}$; (ii) the area enclosed by the Fermi and Luttinger arcs equals the surface particle density to zeroth order in the interlayer couplings. We argue that the approximate equivalence survives interactions that are weak enough to leave the system in the Weyl limit, and term this phenomenon weak Luttingers theorem.

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