We report a comparative polarized Raman study of Weyl semimetals TaAs, NbAs, TaP and NbP. The evolution of the phonon frequencies with the sample composition allows us to determine experimentally which atoms are mainly involved for each vibration mode. Our results confirm previous first-principles calculations indicating that the A1, B1(2), E(2) and E(3) modes involve mainly the As(P) atoms, th...

It has been suggested recently, based on subtle field-theoretical considerations, that the electromagnetic response of Weyl semimetals and the closely related Weyl insulators can be characterized by an axion term θE·B with space and time dependent axion angle θ(r,t). Here we construct a minimal lattice model of the Weyl medium and study its electromagnetic response by a combination of analytica...

We show that a Hamiltonian with Weyl points can be realized for ultracold atoms using laser-assisted tunneling in three-dimensional optical lattices. Weyl points are synthetic magnetic monopoles that exhibit a robust, three-dimensional linear dispersion, identical to the energy-momentum relation for relativistic Weyl fermions, which are not yet discovered in particle physics. Weyl semimetals ar...

In quantum field theory, Weyl fermions are relativistic particles that travel at the speed of light and strictly obey the celebrated Lorentz symmetry. Their low-energy condensed matter analogs are Weyl semimetals, which are conductors whose electronic excitations mimic the Weyl fermion equation of motion. Although the traditional (type I) emergent Weyl fermions observed in TaAs still approximat...

The three-dimensional topological semimetals represent a new quantum state of matter. Distinct from the surface state in the topological insulators that exhibits linear dispersion in two-dimensional momentum plane, the three-dimensional semimetals host bulk band dispersions linearly along all directions. In addition to the gapless points in the bulk, the three-dimensional Weyl/Dirac semimetals ...

Three-dimensional topological Dirac semimetals (TDSs) are a new kind of Dirac materials that exhibit linear energy dispersion in the bulk and can be viewed as three-dimensional graphene. It has been proposed that TDSs can be driven to other exotic phases like Weyl semimetals, topological insulators and topological superconductors by breaking certain symmetries. Here we report the first transpor...

We study a class of Dirac semimetals that feature an eightfold-degenerate double Dirac point. We show that 7 of the 230 space groups can host such Dirac points and argue that they all generically display linear dispersion. We introduce an explicit tight-binding model for space groups 130 and 135. Space group 135 can host an intrinsic double Dirac semimetal with no additional states at the Fermi...

We study the quantum phase diagram of a three dimensional noninteracting Dirac semimetal in the presence of either quenched axial or scalar potential disorder, by calculating the average and the typical density of states as well as the inverse participation ratio using numerically exact methods. We show that as a function of the disorder strength a half-filled (i.e., undoped) Dirac semimetal di...

Metallization of dense hydrogen and associated possible high-temperature superconductivity represents one of the key problems of physics. Recent theoretical studies indicate that before becoming a good metal, compressed solid hydrogen passes through a semimetallic stage. We show that such semimetallic phases predicted to be the most stable at multimegabar (∼300  GPa) pressures are not conventio...

We study transport in Weyl semimetals with N isotropic Weyl nodes in the presence of Coulomb interactions or disorder at temperature T. In the interacting clean limit, we determine the conductivity σ(ω,T) by solving a quantum Boltzmann equation within a "leading log" approximation and find it to be proportional to T, up to logarithmic factors arising from the flow of couplings. In the nonintera...