The type-I antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal InMnTi$_2$

TL;DR

This paper identifies InMnTi2 as a promising type-I antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal with unique electronic features, stable Fermi arcs, and potential for device applications, using advanced first-principles calculations.

Contribution

The study introduces InMnTi2 as a new, easily synthesizable Weyl semimetal with a novel computational approach to accurately determine its magnetic and topological properties.

Findings

Large node separation enabling observable linear dispersions

Presence of stable Fermi arcs across various chemical potentials

Absence of trivial point contributions to low-energy properties

Abstract

Topological materials have been a main focus of studies in the past decade due to their protected properties that can be exploited for the fabrication of new devices. Among them, Weyl semimetals are a class of topological semimetals with non-trivial linear band crossing close to the Fermi level. The existence of such crossings requires the breaking of either time-reversal or inversion symmetry and is responsible for the exotic physical properties. In this work we identify the full-Heusler compound InMnTi$_2$, as a promising, easy to synthesize, $T$- and $I$-breaking Weyl semimetal. To correctly capture the nature of the magnetic state, we employed a novel $\mathrm{DFT}+U$ computational setup where all the Hubbard parameters are evaluated from first-principles; thus preserving a genuinely predictive \textit{ab initio} character of the theory. We demonstrate that this material exhibits several features that are comparatively more intriguing with respect to other known Weyl semimetals: the distance between two neighboring nodes is large enough to observe a wide range of linear dispersions in the bands, and only one kind of such node's pairs is present in the Brillouin zone. We also show the presence of Fermi arcs stable across a wide range of chemical potentials. Finally, the lack of contributions from trivial points to the low-energy properties makes the materials a promising candidate for practical devices.