Axion electrodynamics in topological materials

By A. Sekine, Kentaro Nomura. Journal of Applied Physics, 2020

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the intriguing properties characteristic to three-dimensional topological materials is the topological magnetoelectric phenomena arising from a topological term called the $\theta$ term. Such magnetoelectric phenomena are often termed the axion electrodynamics, since the $\theta$ term has exactly the same form as the action describing the coupling between a hypothetical elementary particle, axion, and a photon. The axion was proposed about forty years ago to solve the so-called strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics, and is now considered as a candidate for dark matter. In this tutorial, we overview theoretical and experimental studies on the axion electrodynamics in three-dimensional topological materials. Starting from the topological magnetoelectric effect in three-dimensional time-reversal invariant topological insulators, we describe the basic properties of static and dynamical axion insulators whose realizations require magnetic orderings. We also discuss the electromagnetic responses of Weyl semimetals with a focus on the chiral anomaly. We extend the concept of the axion electrodynamics in condensed matter to topological superconductors, whose responses to external fields can be described by a gravitational topological term analogous to the $\theta$ term.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26d3ded91fab6e33b4627c7312d6912576aa9ad6

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

  1. Chaoxing Liu
  2. Cui-Zu Chang
  3. Allan H. MacDonald
  4. Ashvin Vishwanath
  5. M. Koshino
  6. Takashi Taniguchi
  7. Kenji Watanabe

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