English

Conductivity of a Weyl semimetal with donor and acceptor impurities

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2017-06-13 v2 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Materials Science Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study transport in a Weyl semimetal with donor and acceptor impurities. At sufficiently high temperatures transport is dominated by electron-electron interactions, while the low-temperature resistivity comes from the scattering of quasiparticles on screened impurities. Using the diagrammatic technique, we calculate the conductivity σ(T,ω,nA,nD)\sigma(T,\omega,n_A,n_D) in the impurities-dominated regime as a function of temperature TT, frequency ω\omega, and the concentrations nAn_A and nDn_D of donors and acceptors and discuss the crossover behaviour between the regimes of low and high temperatures and impurity concentrations. In a sufficiently compensated material [nAnD(nA+nD)|n_A-n_D|\ll(n_A+n_D)] with a small effective fine structure constant α\alpha, σ(ω,T)T2/(T2iωconst)\sigma(\omega,T)\propto T^2/(T^{-2}-i\omega\cdot\text{const}) in a wide interval of temperatures. For very low temperatures or in the case of an uncompensated material the transport is effectively metallic. We discuss experimental conditions necessary for realising each regime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.02078,
  title  = {Conductivity of a Weyl semimetal with donor and acceptor impurities},
  author = {Ya. I. Rodionov and S. V. Syzranov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.02078},
  year   = {2017}
}