Chiral Dirac-like fermion in spin-orbit-free antiferromagnetic semimetals

Pengfei Liu; Ao Zhang; Jingzhi Han; Qihang Liu

doi:10.1016/j.xinn.2022.100343

Chiral Dirac-like fermion in spin-orbit-free antiferromagnetic semimetals

Innovation (Camb). 2022 Oct 19;3(6):100343. doi: 10.1016/j.xinn.2022.100343. eCollection 2022 Nov 8.

Authors

Pengfei Liu^{1

2}, Ao Zhang¹, Jingzhi Han², Qihang Liu^{1

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
² School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
³ Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational Science and Material Design, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
⁴ Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Advanced Quantum Functional Materials and Devices, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.

Abstract

Dirac semimetal is a phase of matter whose elementary excitation is described by the relativistic Dirac equation. In the limit of zero mass, its parity-time symmetry enforces the Dirac fermion in the momentum space, which is composed of two Weyl fermions with opposite chirality, to be non-chiral. Inspired by the flavor symmetry in particle physics, we theoretically propose a massless Dirac-like equation yet linking two Weyl fields with the identical chirality by assuming $SU (2)$ isospin symmetry, independent of the space-time rotation exchanging the two fields. Dramatically, such symmetry is hidden in certain solid-state spin-1/2 systems with negligible spin-orbit coupling, where the spin degree of freedom is decoupled with the lattice. Therefore, the existence of the corresponding quasiparticle, dubbed as flavor Weyl fermion, cannot be explained by the conventional (magnetic) space group framework. The 4-fold degenerate flavor Weyl fermion manifests linear dispersion and a Chern number of $\pm$ 2, leading to a robust network of topologically protected Fermi arcs throughout the Brillouin zone. For material realization, we show that the transition-metal chalcogenide CoNb₃S₆ with experimentally confirmed collinear antiferromagnetic order is ideal for flavor Weyl semimetal under the approximation of vanishing spin-orbit coupling. Our work reveals a counterpart of the flavor symmetry in magnetic electronic systems, leading to further possibilities of emergent phenomena in quantum materials.

Keywords: Weyl fermion; antiferromagnet; isospin symmetry; spin group; topological semimetal.