English

Mirror Anomaly in Dirac Semimetals

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2018-01-09 v3

Abstract

We demonstrate that, apart from the chiral anomaly, Dirac semimetals possess another quantum anomaly, which we call the mirror anomaly, and which manifests in a singular response of the Dirac semimetal to an applied magnetic field. Namely, the anomalous Hall conductivity exhibits step-function singularities when the field is rotated. We show that this phenomenon is closely analogous to the parity anomaly of (2+1)-dimensional Dirac fermions, but with mirror symmetry, which we demonstrate emerges near any Dirac point at a time reversal invariant momentum, replacing the parity symmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.10133,
  title  = {Mirror Anomaly in Dirac Semimetals},
  author = {A. A. Burkov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.10133},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures. Typos corrected. Published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:58:14.545Z