Chiral magnetic effect in ZrTe5

By Qiang Li, D. Kharzeev, Cheng Zhang, Yuan Huang, I. Pletikosić, A. Fedorov, R. Zhong, J. Schneeloch, G. Gu, T. Valla. Nature Physics, 2014

789 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A magnetotransport study of zirconium pentatelluride now reveals evidence for a chiral magnetic effect, a striking macroscopic manifestation of the quantum and relativistic nature of Weyl semimetals. The chiral magnetic effect is the generation of an electric current induced by chirality imbalance in the presence of a magnetic field. It is a macroscopic manifestation of the quantum anomaly1,2 in relativistic field theory of chiral fermions (massless spin 1/2 particles with a definite projection of spin on momentum)—a remarkable phenomenon arising from a collective motion of particles and antiparticles in the Dirac sea. The recent discovery3,4,5,6 of Dirac semimetals with chiral quasiparticles opens a fascinating possibility to study this phenomenon in condensed matter experiments. Here we report on the measurement of magnetotransport in zirconium pentatelluride, ZrTe5, that provides strong evidence for the chiral magnetic effect. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments show that this material’s electronic structure is consistent with a three-dimensional Dirac semimetal. We observe a large negative magnetoresistance when the magnetic field is parallel with the current. The measured quadratic field dependence of the magnetoconductance is a clear indication of the chiral magnetic effect. The observed phenomenon stems from the effective transmutation of a Dirac semimetal into a Weyl semimetal induced by parallel electric and magnetic fields that represent a topologically non-trivial gauge field background. We expect that the chiral magnetic effect may emerge in a wide class of materials that are near the transition between the trivial and topological insulators.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20389b3a409b5495499b1273ff45c3f4130ec4a9

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. J. Venderbos
2. Ashvin Vishwanath
3. S. Liang
4. A. Grushin
5. V. Koch
6. Jeffrey B. Neaton
7. N. Xu
8. N. Ong

In Materials Chemistry

1. J. Venderbos
2. S. Liang
3. A. Grushin
4. Ashvin Vishwanath
5. N. Xu
6. N. Ong
7. R. Ilan
8. M. Lisanti

Citations in the corpus

• Experimental signatures of the chiral anomaly in Dirac–Weyl semimetals (2020, background): “[27], and attributed to the chiral magnetic effect (Fig.”
• Detection of sub-MeV dark matter with three-dimensional Dirac materials (2017, methodology): “Ultrapure semimetalswith∼mmcarriermean free paths have recently been synthesized [109], and our candidatematerial ZrTe5 can, due to its quasi-twodimensional nature, be fabricated as thin flakes with sub-mm thickness [110].”
• Inhomogeneous Weyl and Dirac Semimetals: Transport in Axial Magnetic Fields and Fermi Arc Surface States from Pseudo-Landau Levels (2016, methodology): “[40], we first use that, for three-dimensional Weyl fermions, ns 1⁄4 μ(3)s=ð6π(2)ħ(3)v(3)Þ, which we employ to rewrite the steady-state form of Eq.”
• Mapping the phases of quantum chromodynamics with beam energy scan (2019, background): “4We note that in condensed matter physics a nonzero axial charge is generated in samples of the so-called Dirac or Weyl semimetals [58] by simply applying parallel electric and magnetic fields.”