Observation of Weyl fermions in a magnetic non-centrosymmetric crystal.

Sanchez, Daniel S; Chang, Guoqing; Belopolski, Ilya; Lu, Hong; Yin, Jia-Xin; Alidoust, Nasser; Xu, Xitong; Cochran, Tyler A et al. · Nat Commun · 2020

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The absence of inversion symmetry in non-centrosymmetric materials has a fundamental role in the emergence of a vast number of fascinating phenomena, like ferroelectricity, second harmonic generation, and Weyl fermions. The removal of time-reversal symmetry in such systems further extends the variety of observable magneto-electric and topological effects. Here we report the striking topological properties in the non-centrosymmetric spin-orbit magnet PrAlGe by combining spectroscopy and transport measurements. By photoemission spectroscopy below the Curie temperature, we observe topological Fermi arcs that correspond to projected topological charges of ±1 in the surface Brillouin zone. In the bulk, we observe the linear energy-dispersion of the Weyl fermions. We further observe a large anomalous Hall response in our magneto-transport measurements, which is understood to arise from diverging bulk Berry curvature fields associated with the Weyl band structure. These results establish a novel Weyl semimetal phase in magnetic non-centrosymmetric PrAlGe.