Magnetoresistance of a three-dimensional Dirac gas

Abstract

We study the transversal magnetoconductivity and magnetoresistance of a massive Dirac fermion gas. This can be used as a simple model for gapped Dirac materials. In the zero-mass limit, the case of gapless Dirac semimetals is also studied. In the case of Weyl semimetals, to reproduce the nonsaturating linear magnetoresistance seen in experiments, the use of screened charged impurities is inevitable. In this paper, these are included using the first Born approximation for the self-energy. The screening wave number is calculated using the random phase approximation with the polarization function taking into account the electron-electron interaction. The Hall conductivity is calculated analytically in the case of no impurities and is shown to be perfectly inversely proportional to the magnetic field. Thus the magnetic field dependence of the magnetoresistance is mainly determined by $\sigma_{xx}$. We show that in the extreme quantum limit at very high magnetic fields the gapped Dirac materials are expected to have $\sigma_{xx}\propto B^{-3}$ leading to $\varrho_{xx}\propto B^{-1}$, in contrast with the gapless case where $\sigma_{xx}\propto B^{-1}$ and $\varrho_{xx}\propto B$. At lower fields, we find that the effect of the mass term is negligible and in the region of the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations the two systems behave almost identically. We suggest a phenomenological scattering rate that is able to reproduce the linear behavior at the oscillating region. We show that in the case of the scattering rate calculated using the Born approximation, the strength of the relative permittivity and the density of impurities affects the magnetic field dependence of the conductivity significantly.