Anomalous transport and interaction effects in Weyl metals

Publication date

2019-06-24

Authors

Van Der Wurff, E. C.I.ISNI 0000000527812938

Editors

Advisors

Supervisors

Stoof, H. T.C.ISNI 0000000116481361

DOI

Document Type

Dissertation
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Abstract

This thesis centers around so-called Weyl metals, which are materials that have low-energy excitations that behave as if they were massless Weyl fermions with a definite chirality. Weyl metals can host dissipationless currents when applying external electromagnetic fields, temperature gradients and vorticity. The first part of the thesis therefore focuses on these so-called anomalous transport properties of Weyl metals. We compute the corresponding thermoelectric and magnetovortical response matrices in several different cases and consider in detail what changes when the Weyl cones are tilted. The second part of the thesis centers around interaction effects in Weyl metals. Firstly, we find that the due to the massless character of the Weyl fermions, the anomalous magnetic moment is enhanced significantly as compared to the case of massive electrons. In addition, we show that straining a Weyl metal leads to an interesting type of electron-phonon coupling and compute its influence on the electronic spectral function.

Keywords

physics, theoretical, condensed matter, bandstructrure, semimetal, anomaly, many-body, interactions, topology, massless

Citation

van der Wurff, E C I 2019, 'Anomalous transport and interaction effects in Weyl metals', Doctor of Philosophy, Universiteit Utrecht.