Dipolar Weyl semimetals
Alexander C. Tyner, Shouvik Sur
Abstract
In Weyl semimetals, Weyl points act as monopoles and antimonopoles of the Berry curvature, with a monopole-antimonopole pair producing a net-zero Berry flux. When inversion symmetry is preserved, the two-dimensional (2D) planes that separate a monopole-antimonopole pair of Weyl points carry quantized Berry flux. In this work, we introduce a class of symmetry-protected Weyl semimetals which host monopole-antimonopole pairs of Weyl points that generate a dipolar Berry flux. Thus, both monopolar and dipolar Berry fluxes coexist in the Brillouin zone, which results in two distinct types of topologically nontrivial planes separating the Weyl points, carrying either a quantized monopolar or a quantized dipolar flux. We construct a topological invariant---the staggered Chern number---to measure the latter, and employ it to topologically distinguish between various Weyl points. Finally, through a minimal two-band model, we investigate physical signatures of bulk topology, including surface Fermi arcs, zero-energy hinge states, and response to insertion of a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux vortex.