# Strongly angle-dependent magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetals with long-range disorder

## TL;DR

This paper reveals how the interplay of angle-dependent Landau levels and long-range disorder causes sharply peaked magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetals, aligning with experimental anomalies.

## Contribution

It introduces a mechanism linking angle-dependent internode scattering to magnetoresistance peaks, supported by analytical and numerical analysis.

## Key findings

- Internode scattering time decreases exponentially with angle at high fields
- Scattering time is insensitive to angle at low fields
- Mechanism explains sharply peaked magnetoresistance in experiments

## Abstract

The chiral anomaly in Weyl semimetals states that the left- and right-handed Weyl fermions, constituting the low energy description, are not individually conserved, resulting, for example, in a negative magnetoresistance in such materials. Recent experiments see strong indications of such an anomalous resistance response; however, with a response that at strong fields is more sharply peaked for parallel magnetic and electric fields than expected from simple theoretical considerations. Here, we uncover a mechanism, arising from the interplay between the angle-dependent Landau level structure and long-range scalar disorder, that has the same phenomenology. In particular, we ana- lytically show, and numerically confirm, that the internode scattering time decreases exponentially with the angle between the magnetic field and the Weyl node separation in the large field limit, while it is insensitive to this angle at weak magnetic fields. Since, in the simplest approximation, the internode scattering time is proportional to the anomaly-related conductivity, this feature may be related to the experimental observations of a sharply peaked magnetoresistance.