Abstract
Materials harbouring exotic quasiparticles, such as massless Dirac and Weyl fermions, have garnered much attention from physics and material science communities due to their exceptional physical properties such as ultra-high mobility and extremely large magnetoresistances. Here, we show that the highly stable, non-toxic and earth-abundant material, ZrSiS, has an electronic band structure that hosts several Dirac cones that form a Fermi surface with a diamond-shaped line of Dirac nodes. We also show that the square Si lattice in ZrSiS is an excellent template for realizing new types of two-dimensional Dirac cones recently predicted by Young and Kane. Finally, we find that the energy range of the linearly dispersed bands is as high as 2 eV above and below the Fermi level; much larger than of other known Dirac materials. This makes ZrSiS a very promising candidate to study Dirac electrons, as well as the properties of lines of Dirac nodes.
Highlights
Materials harbouring exotic quasiparticles, such as massless Dirac and Weyl fermions, have garnered much attention from physics and material science communities due to their exceptional physical properties such as ultra-high mobility and extremely large magnetoresistances
Young and Kane showed that those 2D Dirac cones protected by non-symmorphic symmetry cannot be gapped by spin–orbit coupling (SOC), in contrast to 2D cones protected by different symmetries
We show the presence of a Dirac feature below the Fermi level, which is generated by the square Si sublattice and is protected by the non-symmorphic symmetry through a glide plane, supporting the recent prediction by Young and Kane regarding 2D Dirac fermions[23]
Summary
Materials harbouring exotic quasiparticles, such as massless Dirac and Weyl fermions, have garnered much attention from physics and material science communities due to their exceptional physical properties such as ultra-high mobility and extremely large magnetoresistances. We find that the energy range of the linearly dispersed bands is as high as 2 eV above and below the Fermi level; much larger than of other known Dirac materials This makes ZrSiS a very promising candidate to study Dirac electrons, as well as the properties of lines of Dirac nodes. We show by electronic structure calculations and ARPES that the so far unnoticed system, ZrSiS, exhibits several Dirac crossings within the Brillouin zone which form a diamond shaped Fermi surface with a line of Dirac nodes, without any interference of other bands This compound is non-toxic and highly stable with band dispersions of the linear region of those crossings being larger than in any other known compound: up to 2 eV in some regions of the Brillouin zone. ZrSiS is a very promising candidate for investigating Dirac and Weyl physics, as well as the properties of lines of Dirac nodes
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