Evidence for Weyl fermions in a heavy fermion semimetal YbPtBi

 · Invited

Abstract

Materials with non-trivial band topology have been extensively studied in weakly correlated electron systems. Consequently, it is of great interest to test the existence of Weyl fermions when the electronic correlations are strong. Here, we report electronic structure calculations, ARPES, magneto-transport and calorimetric measurements of the canonical heavy fermion semimetal YbPtBi[1], we find triply degenerate points existed in band structure, which split into pairs of Weyl nodes under applying magnetic field. At high temperatures, the chiral anomaly effect is detected in the magneto-transport measurements, which becomes negligible when the electronic correlations become stronger at lower temperatures. However, the topological Hall effect and the temperature dependence of specific heat still demonstrate the existence of Weyl nodes. These results suggest that YbPtBi is a Weyl heavy fermion semimetal, where the bands hosting Weyl nodes are strongly renormalized at low temperatures due to the Kondo effect. Our findings provide a suitable platform to explore the interplay between topology and strong electronic correlations.
[1] C. Y. Guo, F. Wu, Z. Z. Wu, M. Smidman, C. Cao, A. Bostwick, C. Jozwiak, E. Rotenberg, Y. Liu, F. Steglich & H. Q. Yuan*. Evidence for Weyl fermions in a canonical heavy fermion semimetal YbPtBi. Nat. Comms. 9, 4622 (2018).

*This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2017YFA0303100 and 2016YFA0300202), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U1632275 and 11474251) and the Science Challenge Project of China (No. TZ2016004). The ALS and APS are supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. DOE under Contract Nos. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and DE-AC02-06CH11357, including additional support by National Science Foundation under Grant no. DMR-0703406.

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Presenters

  • Chunyu Guo

    • Zhejiang University

Authors

  • Chunyu Guo

    • Zhejiang University

  • Fan Wu

    • Zhejiang University

  • Zhongzheng Wu

    • Zhejiang University

  • Michael Smidman

    • Zhejiang University

  • Chao Cao

    • Department of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University, 310036 Hangzhou, China.
    • Department of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China

  • Aaron Bostwick

    • Advanced Light Source, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • ALS, Lawrence National Berkeley Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source (ALS), E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Chris Jozwiak

    • Advanced Light Source, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • ALS, Lawrence National Berkeley Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, USA
    • Advanced Light Source (ALS), E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Eli Rotenberg

    • Advanced Light Source, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • ALS, Lawrence National Berkeley Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
    • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    • Advanced Light Source (ALS), E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
    • Advanced Light Source, E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  • Yang Liu

    • Zhejiang University

  • Frank Steglich

    • Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, 01187 Dresden, Germany

  • Huiqiu Yuan

    • Zhejiang University
    • Center for Correlated Matter/ Department of Physics, Zhejiang University