Discovery of Weyl fermion semimetals and topological Fermi arc states

By M. Zahid Hasan, Su-Yang Xu, I. Belopolski, Shin-Ming Huang. 2017

405 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weyl semimetals are conductors whose low-energy bulk excitations are Weyl fermions, whereas their surfaces possess metallic Fermi arc surface states. These Fermi arc surface states are protected by a topological invariant associated with the bulk electronic wave functions of the material. Recently, it has been shown that the TaAs and NbAs classes of materials harbor such a state of topological matter. We review the basic phenomena and experimental history of the discovery of the first Weyl semimetals, starting with the observation of topological Fermi arcs and Weyl nodes in TaAs and NbAs by angle and spin-resolved surface and bulk sensitive photoemission spectroscopy and continuing through magnetotransport measurements reporting the Adler–Bell–Jackiw chiral anomaly. We hope that this article provides a useful introduction to the theory of Weyl semimetals, a summary of recent experimental discoveries, and a guideline to future directions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b92563bf76f3d1df13015373947c92b3168b340

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Perspective on topological states of non-Hermitian lattices (2019, background): “Now, the frontiers in this field keep expanding at a rapid pace in ever more interesting directions, like the search for gapless but topological phases such as Weyl semimetals [11, 12] and topological”
Topological Semimetals from First Principles (2018, background): “In this regard, we note that a number of excellent longer and shorter reviews already exist in the general area of gapless topological materials (37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 26, 30, 43, 44, 45, 3, 31, 46, 47, 48, 49, 32).”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “A number of other shorter reviews on specific aspects of topological semimetals have appeared recently (Burkov, 2017, 2016; Hasan et al., 2017, 2015; Jia et al., 2016; Syzranov and Radzihovsky, 2018; Šmejkal et al., 2017a; WitczakKrempa et al., 2014; Yan and Felser, 2017) and connections to…”
Light control with Weyl semimetals (2022, neutral): “[68, 69, 70, 71]; for material properties, see Ref.”