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Flat Band in Disorder Driven Non-Hermitian Weyl Semimetals

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-01-24 v3 Materials Science

Abstract

We study the interplay of disorder and bandstructure topology in a Weyl semimetal with a tilted conical spectrum around the Weyl points. The spectrum of particles is given by the eigenvalues of a non-Hermitian matrix, which contains contributions from a Weyl Hamiltonian and complex self-energy due to electron elastic scattering on disorder. We find that the tilt-induced matrix structure of the self-energy gives rise to either a flat band or a nodal line segment at the interface of the electron and hole pockets in the bulk bandstructure of type-II Weyl semimetals depending on the Weyl cone inclination. For the tilt in a single direction in momentum space, each Weyl point expands into a flat band lying on the plane, which is transverse to the direction of the tilt. The spectrum of the flat band is fully imaginary and is separated from the in-plane dispersive part of the spectrum by the "exceptional nodal ring" where the matrix of the Green function in momentum-frequency space is defective. The tilt in two directions might shrink a flat band into a nodal line segment with "exceptional edge points". We discuss the connection to the non-Hermitian topological theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.05344,
  title  = {Flat Band in Disorder Driven Non-Hermitian Weyl Semimetals},
  author = {A. A. Zyuzin and A. Yu. Zyuzin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.05344},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures