Electron magnetotransport in disordered Weyl semimetals
We study magnetotransport in a disordered Weyl semimetal taking into
account localization effects. In the vicinity of a Weyl node, a single
chiral Landau level coexists with a number of conventional non-chiral
levels. Disorder scattering mixes these topologically different modes
leading to peculiar localization effects. Similar interplay of topology
and localization occurs at the edge of a two-dimensional topological
insulator and in carbon nanotubes. We develop a general theory
describing transport phenomena in all these cases. Our theory yields
conductance, shot noise power, and full counting statistics of the
charge transfer. In the case of a Weyl semimetal, we find that
localization is greatly enhanced in a strong magnetic field with the
typical localization length scaling as 1/B. This situation is typical
for all topological conductors with broken time-reversal symmetry.
Systems with preserved time-reversal symmetry (e.g., carbon nanotubes),
sustain at most one topologically protected channel. For this case, we
derive exact distribution function of transmission probabilities based
on the mapping to a certain random-matrix model.
Last Updated Date : 05/12/2022