Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Apr 4;112(13):136402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.136402. Epub 2014 Mar 31.
Weyl fermions, first proposed for describing massless chiral Dirac fermions in particle physics, have not been observed yet in experiments. Recently, much effort has been devoted to explore Weyl fermions around band touching points of single-particle energy dispersions in certain solid state materials (named Weyl semimetals), similar as graphene for Dirac fermions. Here we show that such Weyl semimetals also exist in the quasiparticle excitation spectrum of a three-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled Fulde-Ferrell superfluid. By varying Zeeman fields, the properties of Weyl fermions, such as their creation and annihilation, number and position, as well as anisotropic linear dispersions around band touching points, can be tuned. We study the manifestation of anisotropic Weyl fermions in sound speeds of Fulde-Ferrell fermionic superfluids, which are detectable in experiments.
外尔费米子最初是在粒子物理学中被提出用来描述无质量手性狄拉克费米子的,目前在实验中尚未观测到。最近,人们在某些固态材料(称为 Weyl 半金属)的单粒子能谱的带接触点附近探索外尔费米子方面投入了大量精力,这与狄拉克费米子在石墨烯中的情况类似。在这里,我们表明,在三维自旋轨道耦合的 Fulde-Ferrell 超导的准粒子激发谱中也存在这种 Weyl 半金属。通过改变塞曼场,可以调节 Weyl 费米子的特性,例如它们的产生和湮灭、数量和位置,以及在带接触点附近的各向异性线性色散。我们研究了各向异性 Weyl 费米子在 Fulde-Ferrell 费米子超流体声速中的表现,这些声速在实验中是可探测的。