177 research outputs found
Strongly angle-dependent magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetals with long-range disorder
The chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals states that the left- and right-handed
Weyl fermions, constituting the low energy description, are not individually
conserved, resulting, for example, in a negative magnetoresistance in such
materials. Recent experiments see strong indications of such an anomalous
resistance response; however, with a response that at strong fields is more
sharply peaked for parallel magnetic and electric fields than expected from
simple theoretical considerations. Here, we uncover a mechanism, arising from
the interplay between the angle-dependent Landau level structure and long-range
scalar disorder, that has the same phenomenology. In particular, we ana-
lytically show, and numerically confirm, that the internode scattering time
decreases exponentially with the angle between the magnetic field and the Weyl
node separation in the large field limit, while it is insensitive to this angle
at weak magnetic fields. Since, in the simplest approximation, the internode
scattering time is proportional to the anomaly-related conductivity, this
feature may be related to the experimental observations of a sharply peaked
magnetoresistance.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Quantized Fermi-arc-mediated transport in Weyl semimetal nanowires
We study longitudinal transport in Weyl semimetal nanowires, both in the
absence and in the presence of a magnetic flux threading the nanowires. We
identify two qualitatively different regimes of transport with respect to the
chemical potential in the nanowires. In the "surface regime", for low doping,
most of the conductance occurs through the Fermi-arc surface states, and it
rises in steps of one quantum of conductance as a function of the chemical
potential; furthermore, with varying flux the conductance changes in steps of
one quantum of conductance with characteristic Fabry-P\'erot interference
oscillations. In the "bulk-surface regime", for highly-doped samples, the
dominant contribution to the conductance is quadratic in the chemical
potential, and mostly conditioned by the bulk states; the flux dependence shows
clearly that both the surface and the bulk states contribute. The two
aforementioned regimes prove that the contribution of the Fermi-arc surface
states is salient and, therefore, crucial for understanding transport
properties of finite-size Weyl semimetal systems. Last but not least, we
demonstrate that both regimes are robust to disorder.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
Defining a bulk-edge correspondence for non-Hermitian Hamiltonians via singular-value decomposition
We address the breakdown of the bulk-boundary correspondence observed in
non-Hermitian systems, where open and periodic systems can have distinct phase
diagrams. The correspondence can be completely restored by considering the
Hamiltonian's singular value decomposition instead of its eigendecomposition.
This leads to a natural topological description in terms of a flattened
singular decomposition. This description is equivalent to the usual approach
for Hermitian systems and coincides with a recent proposal for the
classification of non-Hermitian systems. We generalize the notion of the
entanglement spectrum to non-Hermitian systems, and show that the edge physics
is indeed completely captured by the periodic bulk Hamiltonian. We exemplify
our approach by considering the chiral non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heger and
Chern insulator models. Our work advocates a different perspective on
topological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, paving the way to a better
understanding of their entanglement structure.Comment: 6+5 pages, 8 figure
Mesoscopic Spin Hall Effect
We investigate the spin Hall effect in ballistic chaotic quantum dots with
spin-orbit coupling. We show that a longitudinal charge current can generate a
pure transverse spin current. While this transverse spin current is generically
nonzero for a fixed sample, we show that when the spin-orbit coupling time is
large compared to the mean dwell time inside the dot, it fluctuates universally
from sample to sample or upon variation of the chemical potential with a
vanishing average. For a fixed sample configuration, the transverse spin
current has a finite typical value ~e^2 V/h, proportional to the longitudinal
bias V on the sample, and corresponding to about one excess open channel for
one of the two spin species. Our analytical results are in agreement with
numerical results in a diffusive system [W. Ren et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97,
066603 (2006)] and are further confirmed by numerical simulation in a chaotic
cavity.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Reducing the numerical effort of finite-temperature density matrix renormalization group transport calculations
Finite-temperature transport properties of one-dimensional systems can be
studied using the time dependent density matrix renormalization group via the
introduction of auxiliary degrees of freedom which purify the thermal
statistical operator. We demonstrate how the numerical effort of such
calculations is reduced when the physical time evolution is augmented by an
additional time evolution within the auxiliary Hilbert space. Specifically, we
explore a variety of integrable and non-integrable, gapless and gapped models
at temperatures ranging from T=infty down to T/bandwidth=0.05 and study both
(i) linear response where (heat and charge) transport coefficients are
determined by the current-current correlation function and (ii) non-equilibrium
driven by arbitrary large temperature gradients. The modified DMRG algorithm
removes an 'artificial' build-up of entanglement between the auxiliary and
physical degrees of freedom. Thus, longer time scales can be reached
Finite temperature dynamical DMRG and the Drude weight of spin-1/2 chains
We propose an easily implemented approach to study time-dependent correlation
functions of one dimensional systems at finite temperature T using the density
matrix renormalization group. The entanglement growth inherent to any
time-dependent calculation is significantly reduced if the auxiliary degrees of
freedom which purify the statistical operator are time evolved with the
physical Hamiltonian but reversed time. We exploit this to investigate the long
time behavior of current correlation functions of the XXZ spin-1/2 Heisenberg
chain. This allows a direct extraction of the Drude weight D at intermediate to
large T. We find that D is nonzero -- and thus transport is dissipationless --
everywhere in the gapless phase. At low temperatures we establish an upper
bound to D by comparing with bosonization
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