Colossal anomalous Hall and Nernst effect from the breaking of nodal-line symmetry in Cu2CoSn Weyl semimetal: A first-principles study

TL;DR

This study uses first-principles calculations to reveal that breaking nodal-line symmetry in Cu2CoSn Weyl semimetal induces large anomalous Hall and Nernst effects, promising for spintronics.

Contribution

It demonstrates how perturbations breaking nodal-line symmetry in Cu2CoSn lead to giant Berry curvature and large anomalous transport properties, a novel insight for Heusler compounds.

Findings

Intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity ~1003 S/cm

Anomalous Nernst conductivity ~3.98 A/m-K

Comparable to the largest known values in similar materials

Abstract

The presence of topological band crossings near the Fermi energy is essential for the realization of large anomalous transport properties in the materials. The topological semimetals (TSMs) host such properties owing to their unique topological band structure such as Weyl points or nodal lines (NLs), that is protected by certain symmetries of the crystal. When the NLs break out in the system due to perturbation in Hamiltonian, a large Berry curvature arises in the surrounding area of the gapped NL. In the present work, we studied anomalous transport properties of Cu2CoSn compound, which has a cubic Heusler crystal structure (space group: Fm-3m). The Cu2CoSn full Heusler compound possesses three NLs in the absence of spin-orbit coupling close to the Fermi level. These NLs gap out with the consideration of the SOC and a large Berry curvature observed along the gapped NLs. The integral of Berry curvature gives the intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) about 1003 S/cm and the anomalous Nernst conductivity (ANC) of about 3.98 A/m-K at the Fermi level. These values of AHC and ANC are comparable to the largest reported values for the Co2MnGa Heusler compound. Therefore, Cu2CoSn becomes a newborn member of the family of full Heusler compounds, which possesses giant AHC and ANC that can be useful for the spintronics application.