Optical Distinctions Between Weyl Semimetal TaAs and Dirac Semimetal Na3Bi: An Ab Initio Investigation

Abstract

We present ab initio a study on linear and nonlinear optical properties of topological semimetal Tantalum arsenide and Sodium bismuthate. The real and imaginary part of the dielectric function in addition to the energy loss spectra of TaAs and Na3Bi have been calculated within random phase approximation (RPA); then, the electron–hole interaction is included by solving the Bethe–Salpeter equation for the electron–hole Green’s function. In spite of being in the single category of topological materials, we have found obvious distinction between linear optical responses of TaAs and Na3Bi at a high energy region where, in contrast to Na3Bi, Tantalum arsenide has excitonic peaks at 9 eV and 9.5 eV. It is remarkable that the excitonic effects in the high energy range of the spectrum are stronger than in the lower one. The dielectric function is overall red shifted compared with that of RPA approximation. The resulting static dielectric constants for Na3Bi are smaller than corresponding ones in TaAs. At a low energy region, the absorption intensity of TaAs is more than Na3Bi. The calculated second-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities χijk(2)(ω) show that Tantalum arsenide acts as a Weyl semimetal, and has high values of nonlinear responses in the low energy region which makes it promising candidate for the second harmonic generation in the terahertz frequency region. In the low energy regime, optical spectra are dominated by the 2ω intra-band contributions.