Charge Density Waves and Axion Strings from Weyl Semimetals
By Zhong Wang, Shoucheng Zhang. 2012
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study dynamical instability and chiral symmetry breaking in three-dimensional Weyl semimetals, which turns Weyl semimetals into ``axion insulators.'' Charge density waves (CDWs) are found to be the natural consequence of chiral symmetry breaking. The phase mode of this charge density wave state is identified as the axion, which couples to an electromagnetic field in the topological $\ensuremath{\theta}\mathbf{E}\ifmmode\cdot\else\textperiodcentered\fi{}\mathbf{B}$ term. One of our main results is that ``axion strings'' can be realized as the (screw or edge) dislocations in the charge density wave, which provides a simple physical picture for the elusive axion strings. These axion strings carry gapless chiral modes, therefore they have important implications for dissipationless transport properties of Weyl semimetals with broken symmetry.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8873665629d149953f8db461dc40c14d55919a02
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Condensed Matter Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Nodal-link semimetals (2017, background): “[45] Zhong Wang and Shou-Cheng Zhang, “Chiral anomaly, charge density waves, and axion strings from weyl semimetals,” Phys.”
- Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, methodology): “Gyorffy 1978) Using field theoretic methods Z2 can be evaluated in terms of just the zero frequency oneparticle Green’s function G(0,k) of the interacting system (Wang and Zhang 2012; Wang and Zhang 2013).”