Three-dimensional quantum Hall effect and magnetothermoelectric properties in Weyl semimetals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the 3D quantum Hall effect and magnetothermoelectric properties in Weyl semimetals, revealing a disorder-robust quantized Hall conductivity near Weyl points and predicting measurable thermoelectric features.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of the 3D quantum Hall effect in Weyl semimetals, highlighting the role of Landau levels and disorder robustness, and predicts characteristic thermoelectric signatures.

Findings

3D QHE emerges near Weyl points within a specific Fermi energy range.

Quantized Hall conductivity is robust against disorder for certain layer thicknesses.

Distinct thermoelectric transport features are predicted in the QHE regime.

Abstract

We numerically study the three-dimensional (3D) quantum Hall effect (QHE) and magnetothermoelectric transport of Weyl semimetals in the presence of disorder. We obtain a bulk picture that the exotic 3D QHE emerges in a finite range of Fermi energy near the Weyl points determined by the gap between the $n=-1$ and $n=1$ Landau levels (LLs). The quantized Hall conductivity is attributable to the chiral zeroth LLs traversing the gap, and is robust against disorder scattering for an intermediate number of layers in the direction of the magnetic field. Moreover, we predict several interesting characteristic features of the thermoelectric transport coefficients in the 3D QHE regime, which can be probed experimentally. This may open an avenue for exploring Weyl physics in topological materials.