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Register a new userDisorder and metal-insulator transitions in Weyl semimetals
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The Weyl semimetal (WSM) is a newly proposed quantum state of matter. It has Weyl nodes in bulk excitations and Fermi arcs surface states. We study the effects of disorder and localization in WSMs and find three exotic phase transitions. (I) Two Weyl nodes near the Brillouin zone boundary can be annihilated pairwise by disorder scattering, resulting in the opening of a topologically nontrivial gap and a transition from a WSM to a three-dimensional (3D) quantum anomalous Hall state. (II) When the two Weyl nodes are well separated in momentum space, the emergent bulk extended states can give rise to a direct transition from a WSM to a 3D diffusive anomalous Hall metal. (III) Two Weyl nodes can emerge near the zone center when an insulating gap closes with increasing disorder, enabling a direct transition from a normal band insulator to a WSM. We determine the phase diagram by numerically computing the localization length and the Hall conductivity, and propose that the exotic phase transitions can be realized on a photonic lattice.
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Systems with the power-law quasiparticle dispersion $epsilon_{bf k}propto k^alpha$ exhibit non-Anderson disorder-driven transitions in dimensions $d>2alpha$, as exemplified by Weyl semimetals, 1D and 2D arrays of ultracold ions with long-range interactions, quantum kicked rotors and semiconductor models in high dimensions. We study the wavefunction structure in such systems and demonstrate that at these transitions they exhibit fractal behaviour with an infinite set of multifractal exponents. The multifractality persists even when the wavefunction localisation is forbidden by symmetry or topology and occurs as a result of elastic scattering between all momentum states in the band on length scales shorter than the mean free path. We calculate explicitly the multifractal spectra in semiconductors and Weyl semimetals using one-loop and two-loop renormalisation-group approaches slightly above the marginal dimension $d=2alpha$.
Periodically driven systems provide tunable platforms to realize interesting Floquet topological phases and phase transitions. In electronic systems with Weyl dispersions, the band crossings are topologically protected even in the presence of time-periodic perturbations. This robustness permits various routes to shift and tilt the Weyl spectra in the momentum and energy space using circularly polarized light of sufficient intensity. We show that type-II Weyl fermions, in which the Weyl dispersions are tilted with the appearance of pocket-like Fermi surfaces, can be induced in driven Dirac semimetals and line node semimetals. Under a circularly polarized drive, both semimemtal systems immediately generate Weyl node pairs whose types can be further controlled by the driving amplitude and direction. The resultant phase diagrams demonstrate experimental feasibilities.
It is commonly believed that a non-interacting disordered electronic system can undergo only the Anderson metal-insulator transition. It has been suggested, however, that a broad class of systems can display disorder-driven transitions distinct from Anderson localisation that have manifestations in the disorder-averaged density of states, conductivity and other observables. Such transitions have received particular attention in the context of recently discovered 3D Weyl and Dirac materials but have also been predicted in cold-atom systems with long-range interactions, quantum kicked rotors and all sufficiently high-dimensional systems. Moreover, such systems exhibit unconventional behaviour of Lifshitz tails, energy-level statistics and ballistic-transport properties. Here we review recent progress and the status of results on non-Anderson disorder-driven transitions and related phenomena.
We study dc conductivity of a Weyl semimetal with uniaxial anisotropy (Fermi velocity ratio $xi= v_bot/v_parallel eq1$) considering the scattering of charge carriers by a wide class of impurity potentials, both short- and long-range. We obtain the ratio of transverse and longitudinal (with respect to the anisotropy axis) conductivities as a function of both $xi$ and temperature. We find that the transverse and longitudinal conductivities exhibit different temperature dependence in the case of short-range disorder. For general long-range disorder, the temperature dependence ($sim T^4$) of the conductivity turns out to be insensitive of the anisotropy in the limits of strong ($xigg$ and $ll1$) and weak ($xiapprox1$) anisotropy.
The chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals states that the left- and right-handed Weyl fermions, constituting the low energy description, are not individually conserved, resulting, for example, in a negative magnetoresistance in such materials. Recent experiments see strong indications of such an anomalous resistance response; however, with a response that at strong fields is more sharply peaked for parallel magnetic and electric fields than expected from simple theoretical considerations. Here, we uncover a mechanism, arising from the interplay between the angle-dependent Landau level structure and long-range scalar disorder, that has the same phenomenology. In particular, we ana- lytically show, and numerically confirm, that the internode scattering time decreases exponentially with the angle between the magnetic field and the Weyl node separation in the large field limit, while it is insensitive to this angle at weak magnetic fields. Since, in the simplest approximation, the internode scattering time is proportional to the anomaly-related conductivity, this feature may be related to the experimental observations of a sharply peaked magnetoresistance.
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