Elastic Gauge Fields in Weyl Semimetals

Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Oct 23;115(17):177202. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.177202. Epub 2015 Oct 20.

Abstract

We show that, as happens in graphene, elastic deformations couple to the electronic degrees of freedom as pseudogauge fields in Weyl semimetals. We derive the form of the elastic gauge fields in a tight-binding model hosting Weyl nodes and see that this vector electron-phonon coupling is chiral, providing an example of axial gauge fields in three dimensions. As an example of the new response functions that arise associated with these elastic gauge fields, we derive a nonzero phonon Hall viscosity for the neutral system at zero temperature. The axial nature of the fields provides a test of the chiral anomaly in high energy with three axial vector couplings.