Irreducible momentum-space spin structure of Weyl semimetals and its signatures in Friedel oscillations

Abstract

Materials that break time-reversal or inversion symmetry possess nondegenerate electronic bands, which can touch at so-called Weyl points. The spinor eigenstates in the vicinity of a Weyl point exhibit a well-defined chirality $\pm 1$. Numerous works have studied the consequences of this chirality, for example in unconventional magnetoelectric transport. However, even a Weyl point with isotropic dispersion is not only characterized by its chirality but also by the momentum dependence of the spinor eigenstates. For a single Weyl point, this momentum-space spin structure can be brought into standard "hedgehog" form by a unitary transformation, but for two or more Weyl points, this is not possible. In this work, we show that the relative spin structure of a pair of Weyl points has strong qualitative signatures in the electromagnetic response. Specifically, we investigate the Friedel oscillations in the induced charge density due to a test charge for a centrosymmetric system consisting of two Weyl points with isotropic dispersion. The most pronounced signature is that the amplitude of the Friedel oscillations falls off as $1/r^4$ in directions in which both Weyl points exhibit the same spin structure, while for directions with inverted spin structures, the amplitude of the Friedel oscillations decreases as $1/r^3$.

21 pages, 10 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Electronic structure of the surface superconducting Weyl semimetal PtBi${}_2$
• Friedel oscillations in two-dimensional materials with inverted bands and Mexican-hat dispersion