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Nature Research, Nature Communications, 1(6), 2015

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8373

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A Weyl Fermion semimetal with surface Fermi arcs in the transition metal monopnictide TaAs class

Journal article published in 2015 by Shin-Ming Huang ORCID, Su-Yang Xu, Ilya Belopolski, Chi-Cheng Lee, Guoqing Chang ORCID, BaoKai Wang, Nasser Alidoust, Guang Bian ORCID, Madhab Neupane, Chenglong Zhang, Shuang Jia, Arun Bansil ORCID, Hsin Lin, M. Zahid Hasan ORCID, Others and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

AbstractWeyl fermions are massless chiral fermions that play an important role in quantum field theory but have never been observed as fundamental particles. A Weyl semimetal is an unusual crystal that hosts Weyl fermions as quasiparticle excitations and features Fermi arcs on its surface. Such a semimetal not only provides a condensed matter realization of the anomalies in quantum field theories but also demonstrates the topological classification beyond the gapped topological insulators. Here, we identify a topological Weyl semimetal state in the transition metal monopnictide materials class. Our first-principles calculations on TaAs reveal its bulk Weyl fermion cones and surface Fermi arcs. Our results show that in the TaAs-type materials the Weyl semimetal state does not depend on fine-tuning of chemical composition or magnetic order, which opens the door for the experimental realization of Weyl semimetals and Fermi arc surface states in real materials.