Weyl Node and Spin Texture in Trigonal Tellurium and Selenium

Abstract

We study Weyl nodes in materials with broken inversion symmetry. We find based on first-principles calculations that trigonal Te and Se have multiple Weyl nodes near the Fermi level. The conduction bands have a spin splitting similar to the Rashba splitting around the H points, but unlike the Rashba splitting the spin directions are radial, forming a hedgehog spin texture around the H points, with a nonzero Pontryagin index for each spin-split conduction band. The Weyl semimetal phase, which has never been observed in real materials without inversion symmetry, is realized under pressure. The evolution of the spin texture by varying the pressure can be explained by the evolution of the Weyl nodes in k space.

8 pages, 6 figures

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• The electronic properties of graphene
• Phase transition between the quantum spin Hall and insulator phases in 3D: emergence of a topological gapless phase
• Screened Coulomb interaction in the maximally localized Wannier basis
• Weyl semimetals from noncentrosymmetric topological insulators
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Current-induced Orbital and Spin Magnetizations in Crystals with Helical Structure
• Band splitting and Weyl nodes in trigonal tellurium studied by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density functional theory
• Detecting Chiral Magnetic Effect by Lattice Dynamics