High-field magnetoconductivity of topological semimetals with short-range potential

Abstract

Weyl semimetals are three-dimensional topological states of matter, in a sense that they host paired monopoles and antimonopoles of Berry curvature in momentum space, leading to the chiral anomaly. The chiral anomaly has long been believed to give a positive magnetoconductivity or negative magnetoresistivity in strong and parallel fields. However, several recent experiments on both Weyl and Dirac topological semimetals show a negative magnetoconductivity in high fields. Here, we study the magnetoconductivity of Weyl and Dirac semimetals in the presence of short-range scattering potentials. In a strong magnetic field applied along the direction that connects two Weyl nodes, we find that the conductivity along the field direction is determined by the Fermi velocity, instead of by the Landau degeneracy. We identify three scenarios in which the high-field magnetoconductivity is negative. Our findings show that the high-field positive magnetoconductivity may not be a compelling signature of the chiral anomaly and will be helpful for interpreting the inconsistency in the recent experiments and earlier theories.