Topological response in Weyl semimetals and the chiral anomaly

By A. Zyuzin, A. Burkov. 2012

663 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate that topological transport phenomena, characteristic of Weyl semimetals, namely the semiquantized anomalous Hall effect and the chiral magnetic effect (equilibrium magnetic-field-driven current), may be thought of as two distinct manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, the chiral anomaly. We show that the topological response in Weyl semimetals is fully described by a $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term in the action for the electromagnetic field, where $\ensuremath{\theta}$ is not a constant parameter, like, for example, in topological insulators, but is a field, which has a linear dependence on the space-time coordinates. We also show that the $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term and the corresponding topological response survive for sufficiently weak translational symmetry breaking perturbations, which open a gap in the spectrum of the Weyl semimetal, eliminating the Weyl nodes.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca6a768c58b7bedcd4a375b76c6c1dc0c739d540

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Z2Pack: Numerical Implementation of Hybrid Wannier Centers for Identifying Topological Materials (2016, background): “[39] AA Zyuzin and AA Burkov, “Topological response in Weyl semimetals and the chiral anomaly,” Phys.”
Inhomogeneous Weyl and Dirac Semimetals: Transport in Axial Magnetic Fields and Fermi Arc Surface States from Pseudo-Landau Levels (2016, background): “[15] A A Zyuzin and A A Burkov, “Topological response in Weyl semimetals and the chiral anomaly,” 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).”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “Consider a WSM which has an effective chemical potential difference (∆ ) between the two Weyl nodes and a magnetic field applied in the direction connecting them (Chernodub et al., 2014; Zyuzin and Burkov, 2012).”