Photocurrents in Weyl semimetals

By Ching-Kit Chan, N. Lindner, G. Refael, Patrick Lee. 2016

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The generation of photocurrent in an ideal two-dimensional Dirac spectrum is symmetry forbidden. In sharp contrast, we show that three-dimensional Weyl semimetals can generically support significant photocurrents due to the combination of inversion symmetry breaking and finite tilts of the Weyl spectra. Symmetry properties, chirality relations, and various dependencies of this photovoltaic effect on the system and the light source are explored in detail. Our results suggest that noncentrosymmetric Weyl materials can be advantageously applied to room temperature detections of mid- and far-infrared radiations.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60c97002019e2b8d2a4a78986a823f122bef10ff

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Low-Frequency Divergence and Quantum Geometry of the Bulk Photovoltaic Effect in Topological Semimetals (2020, background): “There are some works highlighting the generation of large linear injection currents in magnetic systems [22–27], but the relationship between the response and band topology has not been understood.”
Type-III and Tilted Dirac Cones Emerging from Flat Bands in Photonic Orbital Graphene (2018, background): “The interest of materials presenting this dispersion is its nonisotropic transport properties, which can be used for valley filtering in p-n junctions [14] or for the generation of a photocurrent [15].”
Light control with Weyl semimetals (2022, background): “The injection current in Weyl semimetals has been investigated both theoretically [156, 159, 158, 161, 175] and experimentally [157, 176, 177].”
Quantized circular photogalvanic effect in Weyl semimetals (2016, background): “Interestingly, a CPGE was predicted for tilted Weyl nodes that lie at the same energy [39] but this effect is not quantized.”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, methodology): “Chan et al., 2017 propose that inversion symmetry breaking WSMs with tilted Weyl cones (Type II most effectively) and doped away from the Weyl point, will be efficient generators of photocurrent and can be used as low frequency IR detectors.”