Weyl Metals

Abstract

Weyl metal is the first example of a conducting material with a nontrivial electronic structure topology, making it distinct from an ordinary metal. Unlike in insulators, the nontrivial topology is not related to invariants associated with completely filled bands but with ones associated with the Fermi surface. The Fermi surface of a topological metal consists of disconnected sheets, each enclosing a Weyl node, which is a point of contact between two nondegenerate bands. Such a point contact acts as a source of Berry curvature or a magnetic monopole in momentum space. Its charge, or the flux of the Berry curvature through the enclosing Fermi surface sheet, is a topological invariant. We review the current state of this rapidly growing field with a focus on bulk transport phenomena in topological metals.