Abstract

Surface Fermi arcs (SFAs), the unique open Fermi-surfaces (FSs) discovered recently in topological Weyl semimetals (TWSs), are unlike closed FSs in conventional materials and can give rise to many exotic phenomena, such as anomalous SFA-mediated quantum oscillations, chiral magnetic effects, three-dimensional quantum Hall effect, non-local voltage generation and anomalous electromagnetic wave transmission. Here, by using in-situ surface decoration, we demonstrate successful manipulation of the shape, size and even the connections of SFAs in a model TWS, NbAs, and observe their evolution that leads to an unusual topological Lifshitz transition not caused by the change of the carrier concentration. The phase transition teleports the SFAs between different parts of the surface Brillouin zone. Despite the dramatic surface evolution, the existence of SFAs is robust and each SFA remains tied to a pair of Weyl points of opposite chirality, as dictated by the bulk topology.

Details

Title
Topological Lifshitz transitions and Fermi arc manipulation in Weyl semimetal NbAs
Author
Yang, H F 1 ; Yang, L X 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Liu, Z K 3 ; Sun, Y 4 ; Chen, C 5 ; Peng, H 5 ; Schmidt, M 4 ; Prabhakaran, D 5 ; Bernevig, B A 6 ; Felser, C 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Yan, B H 7   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Chen, Y L 8 

1  School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; ShanghaiTech Laboratory for Topological Physics, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 
2  State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China 
3  School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; ShanghaiTech Laboratory for Topological Physics, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China 
4  Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany 
5  Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 
6  Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA 
7  Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 
8  School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; ShanghaiTech Laboratory for Topological Physics, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China 
Pages
1-7
Publication year
2019
Publication date
Aug 2019
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20411723
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11491-4
ProQuest document ID
2268063816
Copyright
© 2019. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.