Axion response in Weyl semimetals

By Yige Chen, A. Burkov, Si Wu. 2013

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weyl semimetal is a new phase of matter that provides the first solid state realization of chiral Weyl fermions. Most of its unique physics is a consequence of chiral anomaly, namely nonconservation of the number of particles of a given chirality. Mathematically, this is expressed in the appearance of the so called $\theta$-term in the action of the electromagnetic field, when the Weyl fermions are integrated out. Recently, however, it has been suggested that the analogy between the chiral fermions of quantum field theory with unbounded linear dispersion, and their solid state realization with a dispersion naturally bounded by the bandwidth and crystal momentum defined only within the first Brillouin zone, holds only in a restricted sense, with parts of the $\theta$-term absent. Here we demonstrate that this is not the case. We explicitly derive the $\theta$-term for a microscopic model of a Weyl semimetal by integrating out fermions coupled to electromagnetic field, and show that the result has exactly the same form as in the case of relativistic chiral fermions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91cd7325804411b40373c8274195f4b692b6c143

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

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. J. Venderbos
3. A. Grushin
4. Xiao-Liang Qi
5. P. Hosur
6. R. Ilan
7. K. Landsteiner
8. A. Nahum

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. Xiao-Liang Qi

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. P. Hosur
3. Xiao-Liang Qi
4. K. Landsteiner
5. Phil Saad
6. Shuo-Hui Li
7. Lei Wang

Citations in the corpus

• Recent developments in transport phenomena in Weyl semimetals (2013, background): “[7] who showed, by rederiving the CME in a lattice model, that while the CME is unambiguously non-zero at finite momentum q and frequency ω, its DC limit depends”
• Inhomogeneous Weyl and Dirac Semimetals: Transport in Axial Magnetic Fields and Fermi Arc Surface States from Pseudo-Landau Levels (2016, background): “[96] Y Chen, Si Wu, and A A Burkov, “Axion response in Weyl semimetals,” Phys.”