Fractional Electromagnetic Response in Three-Dimensional Chiral Anomalous Semimetal

Abstract

The magnetoelectric coupling of electrons in a three-dimensional solid can be effectively described by axion electrodynamics. Here we report the discovery of the fractional magnetoelectric effect in chiral anomalous semimetals of the three-dimensional massless Wilson fermions, which have linear dispersions at the energy crossing point, and break the chiral symmetry at generic momenta. In the presence of electric and magnetic fields, the time-reversal and parity symmetry breaking give rise to the quarter-quantized topological magnetoelectric effect, which is directly related to the winding number 1/2 of the band structure, and is only one half of that for topological insulators. The fractional electromagnetic response can be revealed by the surface Hall conductance and extracted from the measurement of the topological Kerr and Faraday rotation. The transition-metal pentatelluride \mathrm{ZrTe_{5}} with a strain-tunable band gap provides a potential platform to test the effect experimentally.

arXiv comment11 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Observation of the dual quantum spin Hall insulator by density-tuned correlations in a van der Waals monolayer
• Calculations of Chern number: equivalence of real-space and twisted-boundary-condition formulae
• Dirac Fermions and Topological Phases in Magnetic Topological Insulator Films
• The One-dimensional Chiral Anomaly and its Disorder Response