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Weyl semimetals, Fermi arcs and chiral anomalies

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 1140–1144 (2016)Cite this article

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Physicists have discovered a new topological phase of matter, the Weyl semimetal, whose surface features a non-closed Fermi surface whereas the low-energy quasiparticles in the bulk emerge as Weyl fermions. A brief review of these developments and perspectives on the next steps forward are presented.

Weyl semimetals are semimetals or metals whose quasiparticle excitation is the Weyl fermion, a particle that played a crucial role in quantum field theory but has not been observed as a fundamental particle in vacuum1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24. Weyl fermions have definite chiralities, either left-handed or right-handed. In a Weyl semimetal, the chirality can be understood as a topologically protected chiral charge. Weyl nodes of opposite chirality are separated in momentum space and are connected only through the crystal boundary by an exotic non-closed surface state, the Fermi arcs. Remarkably, Weyl fermions are robust while carrying currents, giving rise to exceptionally high mobilities. Their spins are locked to their momentum directions, owing to their character of momentum-space magnetic monopole configuration. Because of the chiral anomaly, the presence of parallel electric and magnetic fields can break the apparent conservation of the chiral charge, making a Weyl metal, unlike ordinary non-magnetic metals, more conductive with an increasing magnetic field. These new topological phenomena beyond topological insulators make new physics accessible and suggest potential applications, despite the early stage of the research25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46.

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Figure 1: Signatures of Adler–Bell–Jackiw chiral anomaly in TaAs.
Figure 2: Observation of Weyl fermions and topological Fermi arcs.
Figure 3: Electronic and optical control of Weyl fermions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank I. Belopolski, S.-M. Huang, G. Bian, N. Alidoust and M. Neupane for comments, and D. Haldane, I. Klebanov and E. Witten for discussion as a part of Princeton Summer School on New Insights Into Quantum Matter as a part of Prospects in Theoretical Physics Program at IAS. S.J. is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB239302 and No. 2013CB921901). Work at Princeton by S.-Y.X and M.Z.H. is supported by the US Department of Energy under Basic Energy Sciences (Grant No. DOE/BES DE-FG-02-05ER46200 and No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 at Advanced Light Source at LBNL) and Princeton University funds. M.Z.H. acknowledges Visiting Scientist user support from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, PRISM, and partial support from the Moore Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shuang Jia is at the International Center for Quantum Materials, School of Physics, Peking University and at the Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing 100871, China,

    Shuang Jia

  2. Department of Physics, Su-Yang Xu is at the Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy (B7), Princeton University, New Jersey 08544, USA,

    Su-Yang Xu

  3. Department of Physics, M. Zahid Hasan is at the Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy (B7), Princeton University and at the Princeton Institute for Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM), Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA,

    M. Zahid Hasan

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  1. Shuang Jia
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Correspondence to Shuang Jia or M. Zahid Hasan.

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Jia, S., Xu, SY. & Hasan, M. Weyl semimetals, Fermi arcs and chiral anomalies. Nature Mater 15, 1140–1144 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4787

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