Experimental Tests of the Chiral Anomaly Magnetoresistance in the Dirac-Weyl Semimetals Na3Bi and GdPtBi

By S. Liang, Jing-Jia Lin, S. Kushwaha, J. Xing, N. Ni, R. Cava, N. Ong. Physical Review X, 2018

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the Dirac/Weyl semimetal, the chiral anomaly appears as an "axial" current arising from charge-pumping between the lowest (chiral) Landau levels of the Weyl nodes, when an electric field is applied parallel to a magnetic field $\bf B$. Evidence for the chiral anomaly was obtained from the longitudinal magnetoresistance (LMR) in Na$_3$Bi and GdPtBi. However, current jetting effects (focussing of the current density $\bf J$) have raised general concerns about LMR experiments. Here we implement a litmus test that allows the intrinsic LMR in Na$_3$Bi and GdPtBi to be sharply distinguished from pure current jetting effects (in pure Bi). Current jetting enhances $J$ along the mid-ridge (spine) of the sample while decreasing it at the edge. We measure the distortion by comparing the local voltage drop at the spine (expressed as the resistance $R_{spine}$) with that at the edge ($R_{edge}$). In Bi, $R_{spine}$ sharply increases with $B$ but $R_{edge}$ decreases (jetting effects are dominant). However, in Na$_3$Bi and GdPtBi, both $R_{spine}$ and $R_{edge}$ decrease (jetting effects are subdominant). A numerical simulation allows the jetting distortions to be removed entirely. We find that the intrinsic longitudinal resistivity $\rho_{xx}(B)$ in Na$_3$Bi decreases by a factor of 10.9 between $B$ = 0 and 10 T. A second litmus test is obtained from the parametric plot of the planar angular magnetoresistance. These results strenghthen considerably the evidence for the intrinsic nature of the chiral-anomaly induced LMR. We briefly discuss how the squeeze test may be extended to test ZrTe$_5$.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d9d8f133aa23498202c215563ddcac0c8f0030b

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Citations in the corpus

Experimental signatures of the chiral anomaly in Dirac–Weyl semimetals (2020, methodology): “squeeze test to TaAs at 4 K [17].”