Abstract
The ab-plane optical conductivity of the Weyl semimetal TaP is calculated from the band structure and compared to the experimental data. The overall agreement between theory and experiment is found to be best when the Fermi level is slightly (20 to 60 meV) shifted upwards in the calculations. This confirms a small unintentional doping of TaP, reported earlier, and allows a natural explanation of the strong low-energy (50 meV) peak seen in the experimental ab-plane optical conductivity: this peak originates from transitions between the almost parallel non-degenerate electronic bands split by spin-orbit coupling. The temperature evolution of the peak can be reasonably well reproduce by calculations using an analog of the Mott formula.
Highlights
Weyl fermions [1] are known to be observed as elementary excitations in condensedmatter systems—the Weyl semimetals (WSMs) [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
The measurements have been done on the isotropic ab plane of TaP
The prominent low-energy peak is clearly seen in the real part of the optical conductivity at 50
Summary
Weyl fermions [1] are known to be observed as elementary excitations in condensedmatter systems—the Weyl semimetals (WSMs) [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Our earlier study of the sister compound NbP [34] has demonstrated that the low-energy peaks, similar to the one in TaP, appear in NbP and are due to multiple transitions between almost parallel bands split by spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Based on our band structure calculations, we argue in this paper that the same explanation of its low-energy peak holds for TaP.
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