Download Type-II Symmetry-Protected Topological Dirac Semimetals

Type-II Symmetry-Protected Topological Dirac Semimetals
Tay-Rong Chang_,1 Su-Yang Xu_y,2 Daniel S. Sanchez,2 Wei-Feng Tsai,3, 4 Shin-Ming Huang,5
Guoqing Chang,3, 4 Chuang-Han Hsu,3, 4 Guang Bian,2 Ilya Belopolski,2 Zhi-Ming Yu,6, 7
Shengyuan A. Yang,7 Titus Neupert,8 Horng-Tay Jeng,1, 9 Hsin Liny,3, 4 and M. Zahid Hasany2
1Department
2Laboratory
of Physics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan
for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy (B7),
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
3Centre
for Advanced 2D Materials and Graphene Research Centre
National University of Singapore, 6 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117546
4Department
of Physics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117542
5Department
of Physics, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan
6School
of Physics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
7Research
Laboratory for Quantum Materials, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372,
Singapore
8Department
9Institute
of Physics, University of Zurich, 190, CH-8052, Switzerland, Winterthurerstrass
of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei 11529, Taiwan
The discoveries of Dirac and Weyl semimetal states in spin-orbit compounds led to
the realizations of elementary particle analogs in table-top experiments. Recently, a
new type of emergent Weyl fermion attracted interest because it strongly violates
Lorentz symmetry whose analog does not exist in the Standard Model. While this
state has been dubbed the type-II Weyl semimetal and predicted in a number of
materials, its Dirac counterpart has remained elusive. In this paper, we propose the
concept of the three-dimensional type-II Dirac fermion and theoretically identify this
new symmetry-protected topological state in the large family of transition-metal
icosagenides, MA3 (M=V, Nb, Ta; A=Al, Ga, In). We show that the VAl3 family
features a pair of strongly Lorentz violating type-II Dirac nodes and that each Dirac
node consists of four type-II Weyl nodes with chiral charge ±1 via symmetry
breaking. Furthermore, we predict the Landau level spectrum arising from the type-II
Dirac fermions in VAl3 that is distinct from that of known Dirac/Weyl semimetals.
We also show a topological phase transition from a type-II Dirac semimetal to a
quadratic Weyl semimetal or a topological crystalline insulator via crystalline
distortions.