2021/11/30 by Paweł Matus, Renato M. A. Dantas, Roderich Moessner +1 · 21 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #2D Materials and Applications #Astrophysics #Condensed matter physics #Graphene research and applications #Mathematical physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Semimetal #Skin effect #Theoretical physics #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.2200367119
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(12), e2200367119 (National Academy of Sciences) · 18 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables
openalex publication_date 2022/03/14 · arxiv created 2022/03/15 · arxiv updated 2022/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the propagation of an oscillatory electromagnetic field inside a Weyl semimetal. In conventional conductors, the motion of the charge carriers in the skin layer near the surface can be diffusive, ballistic, or hydrodynamic. We show that the presence of chiral anomalies, intrinsic to the massless Weyl particles, leads to a hitherto neglected nonlocal regime that can separate the normal and viscous skin effects. We propose to use this novel regime as a diagnostic of the presence of chiral anomalies in optical conductivity measurements. These results are obtained from a generalized kinetic theory which includes various relaxation mechanisms, allowing us to investigate different transport regimes of Weyl semimetals.