Evidence for Magnetic Weyl Fermions in a Correlated Metal

TL;DR

This paper provides experimental evidence for magnetic Weyl fermions in a correlated metal, Mn$_3$Sn, revealing their properties and potential for technological applications, and demonstrating their existence in a magnetically ordered, strongly correlated system.

Contribution

It reports the first experimental observation of magnetic Weyl fermions in a strongly correlated, magnetically ordered material, supported by ARPES, DFT, and transport measurements.

Findings

Identification of Weyl fermions in Mn$_3$Sn via ARPES and DFT

Observation of chiral anomaly through positive magnetoconductance

Strong correlation effects causing bandwidth renormalization

Abstract

Recent discovery of both gapped and gapless topological phases in weakly correlated electron systems has introduced various relativistic particles and a number of exotic phenomena in condensed matter physics. The Weyl fermion is a prominent example of three dimensional (3D), gapless topological excitation, which has been experimentally identified in inversion symmetry breaking semimetals. However, their realization in spontaneously time reversal symmetry (TRS) breaking magnetically ordered states of correlated materials has so far remained hypothetical. Here, we report a set of experimental evidence for elusive magnetic Weyl fermions in Mn$_3$Sn, a non-collinear antiferromagnet that exhibits a large anomalous Hall effect even at room temperature. Detailed comparison between our angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements and density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveals significant bandwidth renormalization and damping effects due to the strong correlation among Mn 3$d$ electrons. Moreover, our transport measurements have unveiled strong evidence for the chiral anomaly of Weyl fermions, namely, the emergence of positive magnetoconductance only in the presence of parallel electric and magnetic fields. The magnetic Weyl fermions of Mn$_3$Sn have a significant technological potential, since a weak field ($\sim$ 10 mT) is adequate for controlling the distribution of Weyl points and the large fictitious field ($\sim$ a few 100 T) in the momentum space. Our discovery thus lays the foundation for a new field of science and technology involving the magnetic Weyl excitations of strongly correlated electron systems.