Signatures of the Adler–Bell–Jackiw chiral anomaly in a Weyl fermion semimetal

By Chenglong Zhang, Su-Yang Xu, I. Belopolski, Zhujun Yuan, Ziquan Lin, Bingbing Tong, G. Bian, N. Alidoust, Chi-Cheng Lee, Shin-Ming Huang and 15 more. Nature Communications, 2016

658 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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. Anomalous conducting behavior of solids may reflect the presence of novel quantum states. Here, Zhang et al. report an increased conductivity in TaAs with a magnetic field applied along the direction of the current, which reveals an inherent property of the Weyl Fermion.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14cea0afd802651f7ef84386b6f75f11d8e478c9

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Citations in the corpus

Chiral Anomaly from Strain-Induced Gauge Fields in Dirac and Weyl Semimetals (2016, neutral): “[36] Cheng-Long Zhang, Su-Yang Xu, Ilya Belopolski, Zhujun Yuan, Ziquan Lin, Bingbing Tong, Guang Bian, Nasser”
Experimental signatures of the chiral anomaly in Dirac–Weyl semimetals (2020, neutral): “5a) [32, 33].”
Negative magnetoresistance without well-defined chirality in the Weyl semimetal TaP (2015, positive): “12) and is similar to the Hall effect observed in TaAs 28,29 and NbP 30,36 .”
Fermi-arc diversity on surface terminations of the magnetic Weyl semimetal Co3Sn2S2 (2019, background): “The Berry curvature associated with Weyl and Dirac nodes have been shown to result in unique phenomenology, most notably the chiral anomaly in magneto-transport (9-11) and various non-local transport effects (12, 13).”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “8c, which results from the surface-bulk hybrid orbit (Zhang et al., 2016b).”
Notes on Anomaly Induced Transport (2016, background): “Signatures compatible with it have been measured in a variety of experiments recently [67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77].”