English

A strongly robust Weyl fermion semimetal state in Ta$_{3}$S$_{2}$

Materials Science 2017-01-10 v2

Abstract

Weyl semimetals are extremely interesting. Although the first Weyl semimetal was recently discovered in TaAs, research progress is still significantly hindered due to the lack of robust and ideal materials candidates. In order to observe the many predicted exotic phenomena that arise from Weyl fermions, it is of critical importance to find robust and ideal Weyl semimetals, which have fewer Weyl nodes and more importantly whose Weyl nodes are well separated in momentum space and are located close to the chemical potential in energy. In this paper, we propose by far the most robust and ideal Weyl semimetal candidate in the inversion breaking, single crystalline compound tantalum sulfide Ta3_3S2_2 with new and novel properties beyond TaAs. We find that Ta3_3S2_2 has only 8 Weyl nodes, all of which have the same energy that is merely 10 meV below the chemical potential. Crucially, our results show that Ta3_3S2_2 has the largest kk-space separation between Weyl nodes among known Weyl semimetal candidates, which is about twice larger than TaAs and twenty times larger than the predicted value in WTe2_2. Moreover, we predict that increasing the lattice by <4%<4\% can annihilate all Weyl nodes, driving a novel topological metal-to-insulator transition from a Weyl semimetal state to a topological insulator state. We further discover that changing the lattice constant can move the Weyl nodes and the van Hove singularities with enhanced density of states to the chemical potential. Our prediction provides a critically needed robust candidate for this rapidly developing field. The well separated Weyl nodes, the topological metal-to-insulator transition and the remarkable tunabilities suggest Ta3_3S2_2's potential as the ideal platform in future device-applications based on Weyl semimetals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.08781,
  title  = {A strongly robust Weyl fermion semimetal state in Ta$_{3}$S$_{2}$},
  author = {Guoqing Chang and Su-Yang Xu and Daniel S. Sanchez and Shin-Ming Huang and Chi-Cheng Lee and Tay-Rong Chang and Hao Zheng and Guang Bian and Ilya Belopolski and Nasser Alidoust and Horng-Tay Jeng and Arun Bansil and Hsin Lin and M. Zahid Hasan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.08781},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

25 pages, 6 figures