Effect of disorder on the transverse magnetoresistance of Weyl semimetals

Abstract

We study the effect of random potential created by different types of impurities on the transverse magnetoresistance of Weyl semimetals. It is shown that the magnetic field and temperature dependence of magnetoresistance is strongly affected by the type of impurity potential. Two limiting cases are analyzed in detail: ($i$) the ultra-quantum limit, when the applied magnetic field is so high that only the zeroth and first Landau levels contribute to the magnetotransport, and ($ii$) the semiclassical situation, for which a large number of Landau levels comes into play. A formal diagrammatic approach allowed us to obtain expressions for the components of the electrical conductivity tensor in both limits. In contrast to the oversimplified case of the $\delta$-correlated disorder, the long-range impurity potential (including that of Coulomb impurities) introduces an additional length scale, which changes the geometry and physics of the problem. It is shown that the magnetoresistance can deviate from the linear behavior as a function of magnetic field for a certain class of impurity potentials.

13 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Chiral Anomaly and Diffusive Magnetotransport in Weyl Metals
• Quantum Transport in Topological Semimetals under Magnetic Fields
• Weak antilocalization and localization in disordered and interacting Weyl semimetals
• Carrier screening, transport, and relaxation in 3D Dirac semimetals
• Transversal magnetoresistance and Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in Weyl semimetals
• Magnetotransport and internodal tunnelling in Weyl semimetals
• Nonlinear response in a non-centrosymmetric topological insulator
• Thermoelectric transport coefficients of a Dirac electron gas in high magnetic fields

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