Anomalous hyperfine coupling and nuclear magnetic relaxation in Weyl semimetals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the hyperfine interaction and nuclear magnetic relaxation in Weyl semimetals, revealing an unusual divergence in the orbital hyperfine part and a specific scaling of the relaxation rate, with implications for spintronics and quantum devices.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of hyperfine coupling in Weyl semimetals, highlighting the divergent orbital contribution and deriving the specific relaxation rate scaling, which was not previously understood.

Findings

Orbital hyperfine interaction diverges as inverse energy near the Weyl point.

Nuclear spin relaxation rate scales as E^2 log(E/ω_0).

Hyperfine coupling can be tuned by gating or doping.

Abstract

The electron-nuclear hyperfine interaction shows up in a variety of phenomena including e.g. NMR studies of correlated states and spin decoherence effects in quantum dots. Here we focus on the hyperfine coupling and the NMR spin relaxation time, $T_1$ in Weyl semimetals. Since the density of states in Weyl semimetals varies with the square of the energy around the Weyl point, a naive power counting predicts a $1/T_1T\sim E^4$ scaling with $E$ the maximum of temperature ($T$) and chemical potential. By carefully investigating the hyperfine interaction between nuclear spins and Weyl fermions, we find that while its spin part behaves conventionally, its orbital part diverges unusually with the inverse of energy around the Weyl point. Consequently, the nuclear spin relaxation rate scales in a graphene like manner as $1/T_1T\sim E^2\ln(E/\omega_0)$ with $\omega_0$ the nuclear Larmor frequency. This allows us to identify an effective hyperfine coupling constant, which is tunable by gating or doping, which is relevant for decoherence effect in spintronics devices and double quantum dots where hyperfine coupling is the dominant source of spin-blockade lifting.