Skin effect as a probe of transport regimes in Weyl semimetals

Abstract

We study the propagation of an oscillatory electromagnetic field inside a Weyl semimetal. In conventional conductors, the motion of the charge carriers in the skin layer near the surface can be diffusive, ballistic, or hydrodynamic. We show that the presence of chiral anomalies, intrinsic to the massless Weyl particles, leads to a hitherto neglected nonlocal regime that can separate the normal and viscous skin effects. We propose to use this novel regime as a diagnostic of the presence of chiral anomalies in optical conductivity measurements. These results are obtained from a generalized kinetic theory which includes various relaxation mechanisms, allowing us to investigate different transport regimes of Weyl semimetals.

18 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

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• Population inversion and ultrafast terahertz nonlinearity of transient Dirac fermions in Cd${}_3$As${}_2$
• Phonon-mediated Hydrodynamic Transport in a Weyl Semimetal
• Terahertz third-harmonic generation of lightwave driven Weyl fermions far from equilibrium
• Electric and chiral response to a pseudoelectric field in Weyl materials
• Multipolar Fermi Surface Deformations in Sr${}_2$RuO${}_4$ Probed by Resistivity and Sound Attenuation: A Window into Electron Viscosity and the Collision Operator