Nonlinear transport in Weyl semimetals induced by Berry curvature dipole

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Berry curvature dipole in 3D Weyl semimetals using lattice models, revealing that non-zero effects originate from Fermi surfaces between Weyl nodes rather than the nodes themselves, aligning with recent experimental findings.

Contribution

It provides a systematic theoretical analysis of Berry curvature dipole in 3D Weyl semimetals beyond linear models, explaining the origin of non-zero dipoles in realistic materials.

Findings

Non-zero BCD depends on Fermi surfaces between Weyl nodes.

Lattice models show BCD features consistent with ab initio results.

Chiral chemical potential influences BCD peaks near Weyl nodes.

Abstract

Topological Weyl semimetals (WSMs) have been predicted to be excellent candidates for detecting Berry curvature dipole (BCD) and the related non-linear effects in electronics and optics due to the large Berry curvature concentrated around the Weyl nodes. And yet, linearized models of isolated tilted Weyl cones only realize a diagonal non-zero BCD tensor which sum to zero in the model of WSM with multiple Weyl nodes in the presence of mirror symmetry. On the other hand, recent \textit{ab initio} work has found that realistic WSMs like TaAs-type or MoTe$_2$-type compounds, which have mirror symmetry, indeed show an off-diagonal BCD tensor with an enhanced magnitude for its non-zero components. So far, there is a lack of theoretical work addressing this contradiction for 3D WSMs. In this paper, we systematically study the BCD in 3D WSMs using lattice Weyl Hamiltonians, which go beyond the linearized models. We find that the non-zero BCD and its related important features for these WSMs do not rely on the contribution from the Weyl nodes. Instead, they are dependent on the part of the Fermi surface that lies \textit{between} the Weyl nodes, in the region of the reciprocal space where neighboring Weyl cones overlap. For large enough chemical potential such Fermi surfaces are present in the lattice Weyl Hamiltonians as well as in the realistic WSMs. We also show that, a lattice Weyl Hamitonian with a non-zero chiral chemical potential for the Weyl cones can also support dips or peaks in the off-diagonal components of the BCD tensor near the Weyl nodes themselves, consistent with recent \textit{ab initio} work.