Weyl semimetals from noncentrosymmetric topological insulators

By Jianpeng Liu, D. Vanderbilt. 2014

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the problem of phase transitions from three-dimensional topological to normal insulators without inversion symmetry. In contrast with the conclusions of some previous work, we show that a Weyl semimetal always exists as an intermediate phase regardless of any constriant from lattice symmetries, although the interval of the critical region is sensitive to the choice of path in the parameter space and can be very narrow. We demonstrate this behavior by carrying out first-principles calculations on the noncentrosymmetric topological insulators LaBiTe3 and LuBiTe3 and the trivial insulator BiTeI. We find that a robust Weyl-semimetal phase exists in the solid solutions LaBi1−xSbxTe3 and LuBi1−xSbxTe3 for x ≈ 38.5%‐41.9% and x ≈40.5%‐45.1%, respectively. A low-energy effective model is also constructed to describe the critical behavior in these two materials. In BiTeI, a Weyl semimetal also appears with applied pressure, but only within a very small pressure range, which may explain why it has not been experimentally observed.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bcecd3677ed05e39d63bf1da0fd56367a3515454

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. N. P. Armitage
3. E. Mele
4. Hsin Lin
5. Ling Lu
6. Arun Bansil
7. Liang Fu
8. M. Zahid Hasan

In Materials Chemistry

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. N. P. Armitage
3. E. Mele
4. Hsin Lin
5. Arun Bansil
6. Z. Fang
7. Ling Lu
8. H. Weng

Citations in the corpus

• Observation of Weyl nodes in TaAs (2015, background): “ transition-metal monophosphide TaAs has been predicted to be a Weyl semimetal (WSM), and twelve pairs of Weyl nodes are expected in its 3D Brillouin zone (BZ) [10, 11]. Compared with other proposals [7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22] in realizing a Weyl state, the TaAs family is featur”
• Topological insulators, topological superconductors and Weyl fermion semimetals: discoveries, perspectives and outlooks (2015, background): “This is promising since here it is not necessary to control the size of the magnetic domains [83, 148–150] or to fine-tune the chemical composition as in an alloy [150, 151].”
• Weyl Semimetal Phase in Noncentrosymmetric Transition-Metal Monophosphides (2014, background): “The third one is the solid solutions of ABi1−xSbxTe3 (A 1⁄4 La and Lu) [22] and TlBiðS1−xRxÞ2 (R 1⁄4 Se or Te) [23] tuned around the topological transition points [24].”
• Observation of the Chiral-Anomaly-Induced Negative Magnetoresistance in 3D Weyl Semimetal TaAs (2015, background): “[22] J.”
• Experimental discovery of Weyl semimetal TaAs (2015, unknown): “[32] J.”
• Experimental observation of Weyl points (2015, background): “[7] Jianpeng Liu and David Vanderbilt, “Weyl semimetals from noncentrosymmetric topological insulators,” Physical Review B 90, 155316 (2014).”
• Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “Liu and Vanderbilt, 2014 proposed to realize a WSM in this fashion in LaBi1−xSbxTe3 and LuBi1−xSbxTe3 by doping close to the band inversion transition for a range of dopings near x ∼ 38− 45%.”
• Topological semimetals with helicoid surface states (2015, background): “[12] Jianpeng Liu and David Vanderbilt, “Weyl semimetals from noncentrosymmetric topological insulators,” 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 from First Principles (2018, background): “An example of such proposal is the solid solution LaBi1−xSbxTe3 of the topological insulator LaBiTe3 and normal insulator LaSbTe3 (91).”