Chiral Magnetic Photocurrent in Dirac and Weyl Materials

Abstract

Circularly polarized light (CPL) can induce an asymmetry between the number of left- and right-handed chiral quasiparticles in Dirac and Weyl semimetals. We show that if the photoresponse of the material is dominated by chiral quasiparticles, the total chiral charge induced in the material by CPL can be evaluated in a model-independent way through the chiral anomaly. In the presence of an external magnetic field perpendicular to the incident CPL, this allows to predict the linear density of the induced photocurrent resulting from the chiral magnetic effect. The predicted effect should exist in any kind of Dirac or Weyl materials, with both symmetric and asymmetric band structure. An estimate of the resulting chiral magnetic photocurrent in a typical Dirac semimetal irradiated by an infrared laser of intensity $\simeq 5\times 10^{6}W/{\mathrm{m}}^2$ and a wavelength of $\lambda \simeq 10\mu \mathrm{m}$ in an external magnetic field $B\simeq 2\mathrm{T}$ yields a current $J\simeq 50\mathrm{nA}$ in the laser spot of size $\simeq 50\mu \mathrm{m}$. This current scales linearly with the magnetic field and wavelength, opening up possibilities for applications in photonics, optoelectronics, and THz sensing.

arXiv comment4 pages, 1 figure

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Cited by in corpus (15)

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• How massless are Weyl fermions in Weyl semimetals?
• Total helicity of electromagnetic fields and matter
• Tailoring Photocurrent in Weyl Semimetals via Intense Laser Irradiation
• Intrinsic Contribution to Non-linear Thermoelectric Effect
• The Chiral Qubit: quantum computing with chiral anomaly
• Chiral kinetic theory of anomalous transport induced by torsion
• Transverse Chiral Magnetic Photocurrent Induced by Linearly Polarized Light in Mirror-Symmetric Weyl Semimetals
• Magnetovortical and thermoelectric transport in tilted Weyl metals
• Conformal anomaly and helicity effects in kinetic theory via scale-dependent coupling
• Phonon helicity and Nieh-Yan Anomaly in the Kramers-Weyl semimetals of Chiral Crystals
• Impurities in 3D quadratic band-touching Luttinger semimetals : Friedel and RKKY oscillations