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Dirac fermions in an antiferromagnetic semimetal

Nature Physics volume 12, pages 1100–1104 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Analogues of the elementary particles have been extensively searched for in condensed-matter systems for both scientific interest and technological applications1,2,3. Recently, massless Dirac fermions were found to emerge as low-energy excitations in materials now known as Dirac semimetals4,5,6. All of the currently known Dirac semimetals are non-magnetic with both time-reversal symmetry and inversion symmetry 7,8,9. Here we show that Dirac fermions can exist in one type of antiferromagnetic system, where both and are broken but their combination is respected. We propose orthorhombic antiferromagnet CuMnAs as a candidate, analyse the robustness of the Dirac points under symmetry protections and demonstrate its distinctive bulk dispersions, as well as the corresponding surface states, by ab initio calculations. Our results provide a possible platform to study the interplay of Dirac fermion physics and magnetism.

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Figure 1: The crystal structure, Brillouin zone and electronic structures of orthorhombic CuMnAs.
Figure 2: Electronic structures of CuMnAs without SOC.
Figure 3: Electronic structures of CuMnAs with SOC.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support from the Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515, NSF under Grant No. DMR-1305677 and FAME, one of six centres of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation programme sponsored by MARCO and DARPA.

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Author notes

  1. Peizhe Tang and Quan Zhou: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, McCullough Building, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4045, USA

    Peizhe Tang, Quan Zhou, Gang Xu & Shou-Cheng Zhang

Authors
  1. Peizhe Tang
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  2. Quan Zhou
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  3. Gang Xu
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  4. Shou-Cheng Zhang
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Contributions

P.T., Q.Z., G.X. and S.-C.Z. conceived and designed the project. P.T. performed the first-principles calculations; Q.Z. performed theoretical analysis; P.T. and Q.Z. analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shou-Cheng Zhang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Tang, P., Zhou, Q., Xu, G. et al. Dirac fermions in an antiferromagnetic semimetal. Nature Phys 12, 1100–1104 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3839

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