• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.012023
• Corpus ID: 135466554

Nonlocal annihilation of Weyl fermions in correlated systems

@article{Crippa2019NonlocalAO,
  title={Nonlocal annihilation of Weyl fermions in correlated systems},
  author={Luca Crippa and Adriano Amaricci and Niklas Wagner and Giorgio Sangiovanni and Jan Carl Budich and Massimo Capone},
  journal={Physical Review Research},
  year={2019}
}

• L. Crippa, A. Amaricci, +3 authors M. Capone
• Published 26 April 2019
• Physics
• Physical Review Research

Weyl semimetals (WSMs) are characterized by topologically stable pairs of nodal points in the band structure, that typically originate from splitting a degenerate Dirac point by breaking symmetries such as time reversal or inversion symmetry. Within the independent electron approximation, the transition between an insulating state and a WSM requires the local creation or annihilation of one or several pairs of Weyl nodes in reciprocal space. Here, we show that strong electron-electron interactions may qualitatively change this scenario. In particular, we reveal that the transition to a Weyl semi-metallic phase can become discontinuous, and, quite remarkably, pairs of Weyl nodes with a finite distance in momentum space suddenly appear or disappear in the spectral function. We associate this behavior to the buildup of strong many-body correlations in the topologically non-trivial regions, manifesting in dynamical fluctuations in the orbital channel. We also highlight the impact of electronic correlations on the Fermi arcs.