English

Berry curvature unravelled by the Nernst effect in Mn$_3$Ge

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2019-08-07 v2

Abstract

The discovery of topological quantum materials represents a striking innovation in modern condensed matter physics with remarkable fundamental and technological implications. Their classification has been recently extended to topological Weyl semimetals, i.e., solid state systems which exhibit the elusive Weyl fermions as low-energy excitations. Here we show that the Nernst effect can be exploited as a sensitive probe for determining key parameters of the Weyl physics, applying it to the non-collinear antiferromagnet Mn3_3Ge. This compound exhibits anomalous thermoelectric transport due to enhanced Berry curvature from Weyl points located extremely close to the Fermi level. We establish from our data a direct measure of the Berry curvature at the Fermi level and, using a minimal model of a Weyl semimetal, extract for the first time the Weyl point energy and their distance in momentum-space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.01647,
  title  = {Berry curvature unravelled by the Nernst effect in Mn$_3$Ge},
  author = {Christoph Wuttke and Federico Caglieris and Steffen Sykora and Francesco Scaravaggi and Anja U. B. Wolter and Kaustuv Manna and Vicky Süss and Chandra Shekhar and Claudia Felser and Bernd Büchner and Christian Hess},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01647},
  year   = {2019}
}