With the recent discovery of Weyl semimetals, the phenomenon of negative magnetoresistance (MR) is attracting renewed interest. Large negative MR is usually related to magnetism, but the chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals is a rare exception. Here we report a mechanism for large negative MR which is also unrelated to magnetism but is related to disorder. In the nearly bulk-insulating topological...

The current-voltage characteristics of a new range of devices built around Weyl semimetals has been predicted using the Landauer formalism. The potential step and barrier have been reconsidered for three-dimensional Weyl semimetals, with analogies to the two-dimensional material graphene and to optics. With the use of our results we also show how a Veselago lens can be made from Weyl semimetals...

Topological phases of matter have been among the most active research subjects in condensed matter physics. They can be broadly classified as two major classes. The first class of phases, including topological insulators and superconductors[1–6], and other symmetry protected topological phases[7], have gapped bulks with nontrivial topological structures characterized by topological invariants[8...

We propose a new type of Hopf semimetals indexed by a pair of numbers (p, q), where the Hopf number is given by pq. The Fermi surface is given by the preimage of the Hopf map, which consists of loops nontrivially linked for a nonzero Hopf number. The Fermi surface forms a torus link, whose examples are the Hopf link indexed by (1, 1), the Solomon’s knot (2, 1), the double Hopf-link (2, 2) and t...

Tuning and stabilizing topological states, such as Weyl semimetals, Dirac semimetals or topological insulators, is emerging as one of the major topics in materials science. Periodic driving of many-body systems offers a platform to design Floquet states of matter with tunable electronic properties on ultrafast timescales. Here we show by first principles calculations how femtosecond laser pulse...

In a magnetic field, electrons in metals repeatedly traverse closed magnetic orbits around the Fermi surface. The resulting oscillations in the density of states enable powerful experimental techniques for measuring a metal's Fermi surface structure. On the other hand, the surface states of Weyl semimetals consist of disjoint, open Fermi arcs raising the question of whether they can be observed...

The change in resistance of a material in a magnetic field reflects its electronic state. In metals with weakly- or non-interacting electrons, the resistance typically increases upon the application of a magnetic field. In contrast, negative magnetoresistance may appear under some circumstances, e.g., in metals with anisotropic Fermi surfaces or with spin-disorder scattering and semimetals with...

Ching-Kit Chan,1 Netanel H. Lindner,2 Gil Refael,3 and Patrick A. Lee1 1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA 2Physics Department, Technion, 320003 Haifa, Israel 3Institute of Quantum Information and Matter and Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA (Received 13 August 2016; revised m...

The band structure of strongly correlated two-dimensional (2D) semimetal systems is found to be significantly affected by the spin-orbit coupling (SOC), resulting in SOC-induced Fermi surfaces. Dirac, Weyl and Majorana representations are used for the description of different semimetals, though the band structures of all these systems are very similar. We develop a theoretical approach to the b...