Strongly angle-dependent magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetals with long-range disorder

Abstract

The chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals states that the left- and right-handed Weyl fermions, constituting the low energy description, are not individually conserved, resulting, for example, in a negative magnetoresistance in such materials. Recent experiments see strong indications of such an anomalous resistance response; however, with a response that at strong fields is more sharply peaked for parallel magnetic and electric fields than expected from simple theoretical considerations. Here, we uncover a mechanism, arising from the interplay between the angle-dependent Landau level structure and long-range scalar disorder, that has the same phenomenology. In particular, we ana- lytically show, and numerically confirm, that the internode scattering time decreases exponentially with the angle between the magnetic field and the Weyl node separation in the large field limit, while it is insensitive to this angle at weak magnetic fields. Since, in the simplest approximation, the internode scattering time is proportional to the anomaly-related conductivity, this feature may be related to the experimental observations of a sharply peaked magnetoresistance.

8 pages, 4 figures

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• Anomalous conductance scaling in strained Weyl semimetals
• Nonlinear Chiral Transport in Dirac Semimetals
• Disorder-induced coupling of Weyl nodes in WTe${}_2$
• Quasiparticles-mediated thermal diode effect in Weyl Josephson junctions
• Semiclassical Boltzmann magnetotransport theory in anisotropic systems with a nonvanishing Berry curvature
• Transversal magnetotransport in Weyl semimetals: Exact numerical approach
• Chiral Anomaly Trapped in Weyl Metals: Nonequilibrium Valley Polarization at Zero Magnetic Field
• Effects of critical correlations on quantum percolation in two dimensions