Atomic vibrations are partially screened by electrons. In a metal this screening can change rapidly for vibrations associated to certain points of the Brillouin zone, entirely determined by the shape of the Fermi surface. The consequent anomalous behaviour of the phonon dispersion is called Kohn anomaly. Graphite is a semimetal. Nanotubes can be metals or semiconductors. We demonstrate that two...

We consider extended Hubbard models with repulsive interactions on a honeycomb lattice, and the transitions from the semimetal to Mott insulating phases at half-filling. Because of the frustrated nature of the second-neighbor interactions, topological Mott phases displaying the quantum Hall and the quantum spin Hall effects are found for spinless and spin fermion models, respectively. The mean-...

Based on density functional calculation using the local density approximation+U method, we predict that osmium compounds such as CaOs(2)O(4) and SrOs(2)O(4) can be stabilized in the geometrically frustrated spinel crystal structure. They show ferromagnetic order in a reasonable range of the on-site Coulomb correlation U and exotic electronic properties, in particular, a large magnetoelectric co...

By means of density functional theory based calculations, we study the role of spin-orbit coupling in the new family of ABC hyperferroelectrics [Garrity, Rabe, and Vanderbilt Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 127601 (2014)]. We unveil an extremely rich physics strongly linked to ferroelectric properties, ranging from the electric control of bulk Rashba effect to the existence of a three-dimensional topolog...

The structural (4 x 1) to (8 x 2) transition and the electronic metal to semimetal transition at the In/Si interface are studied with scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. Both transitions are gradual, resulting in a complex domain structure in the transition temperature regime. At these intermediate temperatures, the metallic (4 x 1) and semimetallic (8 x 2) domains coexist with each...

We describe monocrystalline graphitic films, which are a few atoms thick but are nonetheless stable under ambient conditions, metallic, and of remarkably high quality. The films are found to be a two-dimensional semimetal with a tiny overlap between valence and conductance bands, and they exhibit a strong ambipolar electric field effect such that electrons and holes in concentrations up to 10(1...

A magnetoelectric mapping is demonstrated between dephasing effects of the magnetic vector potential and effects of an effective vector potential describing spin-orbit interaction. The experiments use spin-dependent mesoscopic quantum transport experiments on the narrow-gap semiconductor InSb and the semimetal Bi, both materials with strong spin-orbit interaction. The spin-orbit-induced antiloc...

Three-dimensional Dirac semimetals, three-dimensional analogues of graphene, are unusual quantum materials with massless Dirac fermions, which can be further converted to Weyl fermions by breaking time reversal or inversion symmetry. Topological surface states with Fermi arcs are predicted on the surface and have been observed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments. Although t...

In this work we study the effects of in-plane magnetic fields on thin films of the Dirac Semimetal (DSM) Na3Bi where one of the in-plane directions is perpendicular to the k-separation between the two Weyl nodes that exist for each spin orientation. We show numerically that the states localized near the surfaces of these thin films are related to the Fermi arc states in semi-infinite slabs. Due...

Figure S1. (Color online) The unit cell is shown for the b-c face projected along the a axis. The tungsten atoms are surrounded by tellurium octahedra that are distorted due to the zig-zag nature of the tungsten chains. using both the local spin density approximation (LSDA) as well as the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) using the full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave (FP-LAPW)...