A Weyl Fermion semimetal with surface Fermi arcs in the transition metal monopnictide TaAs class

By Shin-Ming Huang, Su-Yang Xu, I. Belopolski, Chi-Cheng Lee, G. Chang, Baokai Wang, N. Alidoust, G. Bian, M. Neupane, Chenglong Zhang and 4 more. Nature Communications, 2015

836 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weyl fermions are massless chiral fermions that play an important role in quantum field theory but have never been observed as fundamental particles. A Weyl semimetal is an unusual crystal that hosts Weyl fermions as quasiparticle excitations and features Fermi arcs on its surface. Such a semimetal not only provides a condensed matter realization of the anomalies in quantum field theories but also demonstrates the topological classification beyond the gapped topological insulators. Here, we identify a topological Weyl semimetal state in the transition metal monopnictide materials class. Our first-principles calculations on TaAs reveal its bulk Weyl fermion cones and surface Fermi arcs. Our results show that in the TaAs-type materials the Weyl semimetal state does not depend on fine-tuning of chemical composition or magnetic order, which opens the door for the experimental realization of Weyl semimetals and Fermi arc surface states in real materials. Proposals for the realization of Weyl semimetals, topologically non-trivial materials which host Weyl fermion quasiparticles, have faced demanding experimental requirements. Here, the authors predict such a state in stoichiometric TaAs, arising due to the breaking of inversion symmetry.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8ffdb98ee9c27dfa338a20465cc41d95124c17f

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Citations in the corpus

Heusler 4.0: Tunable Materials (2016, background): “Weyl semimetals (WSM) are a class of topological semimetals, beyond topological insulators, where the conduction and valence bands cross in the vicinity of the Fermi level (88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100).”
Z2Pack: Numerical Implementation of Hybrid Wannier Centers for Identifying Topological Materials (2016, neutral): “[145] Shin-Ming Huang, Su-Yang Xu, Ilya Belopolski, ChiCheng Lee, Guoqing Chang, BaoKai Wang, Nasser Alidoust, Guang Bian, Madhab Neupane, Chenglong Zhang, et al.”
Symmetry Indicators and Anomalous Surface States of Topological Crystalline Insulators (2017, neutral): “[47] Shin-Ming Huang, Su-Yang Xu, Ilya Belopolski, Chi-Cheng”