Disorder effect on chiral edge modes and anomalous Hall conductance in Weyl semimetals

Abstract

Typical Weyl semimetals host chiral surface states and hence show an anomalous Hall response. Although a Weyl semimetal phase is known to be robust against weak disorder, the influence of disorder on chiral states is not fully clarified so far. We study the behavior of such chiral states in the presence of disorder and its consequences on an anomalous Hall response, focusing on a thin slab of Weyl semimetal with chiral surface states along its edge. It is shown that weak disorder does not disrupt chiral edge states but crucially affects them owing to the renormalization of a mass parameter: the number of chiral edge states changes depending on the strength of disorder. It is also shown that the Hall conductance is quantized when the Fermi level is located near Weyl nodes within a finite-size gap. This quantization of the Hall conductance collapses once the strength of disorder exceeds a critical value, suggesting that it serves as a probe to distinguish a Weyl semimetal phase from a diffusive anomalous Hall metal phase.

9 pages, 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Finite-size effects in non-Hermitian topological systems
• Engineering topological phases with a three-dimensional nodal-loop semimetal
• Disorder effects on triple-point fermions
• Chiral edge state coupling theory of transport in quantum anomalous Hall insulators
• Phase Diagram of a Non-Hermitian Chern Insulator: Destabilization of Chiral Edge States and Bulk-Boundary Correspondence
• Bulk--Boundary Correspondence and Boundary Zero Modes in a Non-Hermitian Kitaev Chain Model
• Chiral surface states on the step edge in a Weyl semimetal
• Spontaneous charge current in a doped Weyl semimetal
• Intrinsic and extrinsic anomalous Hall effects in disordered magnetic Weyl semimetal