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

作者：Huang, Shin-Ming; Xu, Su-Yang^*; Belopolski, Ilya; Lee, Chi-Cheng; Chang, Guoqing; Wang, BaoKai; Alidoust, Nasser; Bian, Guang; Neupane, Madhab; Zhang, Chenglong; Jia, Shuang; Bansil, Arun; Lin, Hsin; Hasan, M. Zahid

来源：Nature Communications, 2015, 6(1): 7373.

DOI：10.1038/ncomms8373

Weyl 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.

• 出版日期2015-6
• 单位北京大学; 东北大学