Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 24: Transport: Weyl Semimetals
TT 24.10: Talk
Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 12:15–12:30, H18
Visualizing the chiral anomaly in Dirac and Weyl semimetals with photoemissspectroscopy — •Jan Behrends1, Adolfo G Grushin3, Teemu Ojanen2, and Jens H Bardarson1 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Nöthnitzer Str. 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany — 2Low Temperature Laboratory, Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University, FI-00076 AALTO, Finland — 3Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Quantum anomalies are the breaking of a classical symmetry by quantum fluctuations. They dictate how physical systems of diverse nature, ranging from fundamental particles to crystalline materials, respond topologically to external perturbations, insensitive to local details. In the solid state, it fundamentally affects the properties of topological Weyl and Dirac semimetals, recently realized experimentally.
In this work we propose that the most identifying consequence of the chiral anomaly, the charge density imbalance between fermions of different chirality induced by non-orthogonal electric and magnetic fields, can be directly observed in these materials with the existing technology of photoemission spectroscopy. With angle resolution, the chiral anomaly is identified by a characteristic note-shaped pattern of the emission spectra, originating from the imbalanced occupation of the bulk states and a previously unreported momentum dependent energy shift of the surface state Fermi arcs. Thereby, our work provides essential theoretical input to foster the direct visualization of the chiral anomaly in condensed matter.