Condensed Matter Seminars

Topological  Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three dimensions have gapless (massless) Weyl fermions. These semimetals were predicted theoretically in 2011 (Vishwanath et al, Burkov and Balents) and have been experimentally discovered recently in TaAs, TaP, NbAs, NbP (Weng et al., Huang et al., Shekhar et al., 2015). Although these gapless systems can be gapped (given mass) trivially by symmetry breaking terms, a more interesting problem is if they can be gapped without breaking symmetries? We show that you can indeed do this by introducing many body interactions. We also show that this symmetry-preserving gapping gives point-like and line-like anyonic excitations in the gapped bulk.