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Weyl semimetals, Fermi arcs and chiral anomalies

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Physicists have discovered a new topological phase of matter, the Weyl semimetal, whose surface features a non-closed Fermi surface whereas the low-energy quasiparticles in the bulk emerge as Weyl fermions. A brief review of these developments and perspectives on the next steps forward are presented.

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Figure 1: Signatures of Adler–Bell–Jackiw chiral anomaly in TaAs.
Figure 2: Observation of Weyl fermions and topological Fermi arcs.
Figure 3: Electronic and optical control of Weyl fermions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank I. Belopolski, S.-M. Huang, G. Bian, N. Alidoust and M. Neupane for comments, and D. Haldane, I. Klebanov and E. Witten for discussion as a part of Princeton Summer School on New Insights Into Quantum Matter as a part of Prospects in Theoretical Physics Program at IAS. S.J. is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB239302 and No. 2013CB921901). Work at Princeton by S.-Y.X and M.Z.H. is supported by the US Department of Energy under Basic Energy Sciences (Grant No. DOE/BES DE-FG-02-05ER46200 and No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 at Advanced Light Source at LBNL) and Princeton University funds. M.Z.H. acknowledges Visiting Scientist user support from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, PRISM, and partial support from the Moore Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shuang Jia is at the International Center for Quantum Materials, School of Physics, Peking University and at the Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter, Beijing 100871, China,

    Shuang Jia

  2. Department of Physics, Su-Yang Xu is at the Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy (B7), Princeton University, New Jersey 08544, USA,

    Su-Yang Xu

  3. Department of Physics, M. Zahid Hasan is at the Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy (B7), Princeton University and at the Princeton Institute for Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM), Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA,

    M. Zahid Hasan

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  1. Shuang Jia
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  2. Su-Yang Xu
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  3. M. Zahid Hasan
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Correspondence to Shuang Jia or M. Zahid Hasan.

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Jia, S., Xu, SY. & Hasan, M. Weyl semimetals, Fermi arcs and chiral anomalies. Nature Mater 15, 1140–1144 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4787

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