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Black hole mirages: electron lensing and Berry curvature effects in inhomogeneously tilted Weyl semimetals
by Andreas Haller, Suraj Hegde, Chen Xu, Christophe De Beule, Thomas L. Schmidt, Tobias Meng
This Submission thread is now published as
Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Andreas Haller |
| Submission information | |
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| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16254v4 (pdf) |
| Date accepted: | 2023-03-27 |
| Date submitted: | 2023-02-21 14:01 |
| Submitted by: | Haller, Andreas |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
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Abstract
We study electronic transport in Weyl semimetals with spatially varying nodal tilt profiles. We find that the flow of electrons can be guided precisely by judiciously chosen tilt profiles. In a broad regime of parameters, we show that electron flow is described well by semiclassical equations of motion similar to the ones governing gravitational attraction. This analogy provides a physically transparent tool for designing tiltronic devices like electronic lenses. The analogy to gravity circumvents the notoriously difficult full-fledged description of inhomogeneous solids. A comparison to microscopic lattice simulations shows that it is only valid for trajectories sufficiently far from analogue black holes. We finally comment on the Berry curvature-driven transverse motion and relate the latter to spin precession physics.
Author comments upon resubmission
In particular, Appendix A of the revised version contains more details on the derivation of the semiclassical equations of motion. We further fixed an issue with the effective mass of trajectories (it was defined as an inverse mass in the earlier versions).
List of changes
- Revised appendix A
- Changed the definition of the effective mass
Published as SciPost Phys. 14, 119 (2023)
Reports on this Submission
Report #1 by Jasper van Wezel (Referee 1) on 2023-2-22 (Invited Report)
- Cite as: Jasper van Wezel, Report on arXiv:2210.16254v4, delivered 2023-02-22, doi: 10.21468/SciPost.Report.6779
Strengths
1 well-written
2 thorough analysis on multiple scales
3 novel and timely
4 opens up an area of “tilt-tronics”
Report
I would like to sincerely thank the authors for their patience and careful consideration of my comments.
The latest reply and resubmission resolve my remaining questions.
My earlier confusion about Figure 1 stemmed from the fact that the red line, and only that line, concerns an outgoing light ray, corresponding to a wave packet on the opposite branch of the Weyl node as compared to all other trajectories in the figure.
The outgoing mode, however, is still being described with the proper time belonging to infalling observers. The infalling observer sees the outgoing light frozen at the horizon and then speed up as it escapes to infinity, as explained by the authors.
I did not notice before that the red line was different from all other lines in the figure, because the entire section 3.0 is about defining different types of infalling modes (lensing, capture, and seperatrix), and not outgoing ones. In the latest revision, the authors added a line at the end of this secion mentioning the difference between the red line and the others. I would (optionally) suggest that adding a similar comment already in the caption of figure 1 could be very helpful to readers.
I am happy to now recommend publication of this work in SciPost Physics.