Chiral Hall effect in strained Weyl semimetals

TL;DR

This paper predicts a chiral Hall effect in strained Weyl semimetals driven by electron-phonon interactions, leading to charge separation and optical absorption features without external magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel strain-induced chiral Hall effect in Weyl semimetals using chiral kinetic theory, highlighting new transport phenomena and optical signatures.

Findings

Chiral Hall effect arises from structural distortion and time-varying electric fields.

Emergence of an optical absorption peak at a characteristic phonon frequency.

Proposal of strain-induced planar Hall effect as a transport signature.

Abstract

In this paper, the chiral Hall effect of strained Weyl semimetals without any external magnetic field is proposed. Electron-phonon coupling emerges in the low-energy fermionic sector through a pseudogauge potential. We show that, by using chiral kinetic theory, the chiral Hall effect appears as a response to a real time-varying electric field in the presence of structural distortion and it causes spatial chirality and charges separation in a Weyl system. We also show that the coupling of the electrons to acoustic phonons as a gapless excitation leads to emerging an optical absorption peak at $\omega=\omega_{el}$, where $\omega_{el}$ is defined as a characteristic frequency associated with the pseudomagnetic field. We also propose the strain-induced planar Hall effect as another transport signature of the chiral-anomaly equation.