Field-Selective Anomaly and Chiral Mode Reversal in Type-II Weyl Materials

Abstract

Three-dimensional condensed matter incarnations of Weyl fermions generically have a tilted dispersion—in sharp contrast to their elusive high-energy relatives where a tilt is forbidden by Lorentz invariance, and with the low- energy excitations of two-dimensional graphene sheets where a tilt is forbidden by either crystalline or particle-hole symmetry. Very recently, a number of materials (MoTe2, LaAlGe, and WTe2) have been identified as hosts of so-called type-II Weyl fermions whose dispersion is so strongly tilted that a Fermi surface is formed, whereby the Weyl node becomes a singular point connecting electron and hole pockets. We here predict that these systems have remarkable properties in the presence of magnetic fields. Most saliently, we show that the nature of the chiral anomaly depends crucially on the relative angle between the applied field and the tilt, and that an inversion-asymmetric overtilting creates an imbalance in the number of chiral modes with positive and negative slopes. The field-selective anomaly gives a novel magneto-optical resonance, providing an experimental way to detect concealed Weyl nodes.