Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

In 1929, a German mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl proposed that a massless solution of the Dirac equation represents a pair of new type of particles, the so-called Weyl fermions. However, their existence in particle physics remains elusive after more than eight decades, e.g., neutrino has been regarded as a Weyl fermion in the Standard Model until it was found to have mass. Recently, significant advances in both topological insulators and topological semimetals have provided an alternative way to realize Weyl fermions in condensed matter as an emergent phenomenon. Weyl semimetals are predicted as a class of topological materials that can be regarded as three-dimensional analogs of graphene breaking time reversal or inversion symmetry. Electrons in a Weyl semimetal behave exactly as Weyl fermions, which have many exotic properties, such as chiral anomaly, magnetic monopoles in the crystal momentum space, and open Fermi arcs on the surface. In this talk I will report our discovery of a Weyl semimetal in TaAs by observing Fermi arcs in the surface states and Weyl nodes in the bulk states using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy.