English

Quasiparticle Interference of Surface States in Type-II Weyl Semimetal WTe$_2$

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2017-10-18 v2

Abstract

Topological Weyl semimetal (TWS) is a metal, where low energy excitations behave like Weyl fermions of high-energy physics. It was recently shown that due to the lower symmetry of condensed matter systems, they can realize two distinct types of Weyl fermions. The type-I Weyl fermion in a metal is formed by a linear crossing of two bands at a point in the crystalline momentum space - Brillouin zone (BZ). The second type TWSs host type-II Weyl points appearing at the touching points of electron and hole pockets, which is a result of tilted linear dispersion. The type-II TWS was predicted to exist in several compounds, including WTe2_2. Several ARPES studies of WTe2_2 were reported so far, having contradictory conclusions on the topological nature of observed Fermi arcs. In this work, we report the results of spectroscopic imaging with a scanning tunneling microscope and first principle calculations, establishing a clear quasiparticle interference features of the surface states of WTe2_2. Our work provides a strong evidence for surface state scattering. Although the surface Fermi arcs are clearly observed, it is still difficult to prove the existence of predicted Type-II Weyl points in the bulk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.11189,
  title  = {Quasiparticle Interference of Surface States in Type-II Weyl Semimetal WTe$_2$},
  author = {Wenhan Zhang and Quansheng Wu and Lunyong Zhang and Sang-Wook Cheong and Alexey A. Soluyanov and Weida Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.11189},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

11 pages, 3 figures