RKKY interaction in Weyl semimetal nanowires
Abstract
We investigate the effective couplings induced between localized impurities on the surface of a Weyl semimetal (WSM) nanowire within the framework of Ruderman--Kittel--Kasuya--Yosida (RKKY) theory. The itinerant electrons from the chiral Fermi arc surface states mediate impurity-impurity interaction at low energies. As a result, the spin-momentum locking naturally plays a central role in shaping the spin-spin correlations. We show that the dominant interaction channels have distinct origins: while the azimuthal coupling, term arises exclusively from Fermi arc states with identical spin polarization, the couplings () are governed by Fermi arc states with opposite spin polarizations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that purely surface-mediated contributions exhibit different scaling behavior compared to those involving Fermi arcs and low-energy bulk states. We systematically untangle the contributions from bulk and surface states to the RKKY couplings, using analytical and numerical methods. Our results establish WSM nanowires as a versatile platform for engineering and simulating a broad class of spin models.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.10589,
title = {RKKY interaction in Weyl semimetal nanowires},
author = {Rohit Mukherjee and Asutosh Dubey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10589},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, 5 Figures; Comments welcome