Chiral gauge field and axial anomaly in a Weyl semimetal

By Chaoxing Liu, P. Ye, Xiao-Liang Qi. 2012

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weyl fermions are two-component chiral fermions in (3+1) dimensions. When coupled to a gauge field, the Weyl fermion is known to have an axial anomaly, which means the current conservation of the left-handed and right-handed Weyl fermions cannot be preserved separately. Recently, Weyl fermions have been proposed in condensed-matter systems named “Weyl semimetals.” In this paper we propose a Weyl semimetal phase in magnetically doped topological insulators, and study the axial anomaly in this system. We propose that the magnetic fluctuation in this system plays the role of a “chiral gauge field” which minimally couples to the Weyl fermions with opposite charges for two chiralities. We study the anomaly equation of this system and discuss its physical consequences, including one-dimensional chiral modes in a ferromagnetic vortex line, and a novel plasmon-magnon coupling.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a0b32cefdf823a7a56020292bb775f3d7447c12

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. Hsin Lin
3. Arun Bansil
4. M. Zahid Hasan
5. Zhong Wang
6. Liang Fu
7. Su-Yang Xu
8. Shoucheng Zhang

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. Hsin Lin
3. Arun Bansil
4. Liang Fu
5. Chen Fang
6. M. Zahid Hasan
7. Shoucheng Zhang
8. Zhong Wang

In Materials Chemistry

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. Hsin Lin
3. Arun Bansil
4. M. Zahid Hasan
5. Su-Yang Xu
6. Shoucheng Zhang
7. Liang Fu
8. Ling Lu

Citations in the corpus

• Chiral Anomaly from Strain-Induced Gauge Fields in Dirac and Weyl Semimetals (2016, background): “[28], which considered Weyl fermions in magnetically doped topological insulators.”
• Nodal-link semimetals (2017, background): “[42] Chao-Xing Liu, Peng Ye, and Xiao-Liang Qi, “Chiral gauge field and axial anomaly in a weyl semimetal,” Phys.”
• Discovery of a Weyl fermion semimetal and topological Fermi arcs (2015, background): “Recently, it was understood that a Weyl fermion can emerge as a quasiparticle in certain crystals, Weyl fermion semimetals (1-22).”
• Topological semimetals with helicoid surface states (2015, background): “[5] Chao-Xing Liu, Peng Ye, and Xiao-Liang Qi, “Chiral gauge field and axial anomaly in a weyl semimetal,” Phys.”
• Inhomogeneous Weyl and Dirac Semimetals: Transport in Axial Magnetic Fields and Fermi Arc Surface States from Pseudo-Landau Levels (2016, background): “The continuity equation for the current for each species js 1⁄4 ðns; jsÞ is determined by [13,88]”