Frontiers in Topological Materials Theory

Noncentrosymmetric Weyl semimetals have been studied extensively due to the emergent relativistic properties of their low-energy excitations. Of particular interest is the possibility of driving an electric current parallel to an applied magnetic field when the system is out of equilibrium, thus enabling novel magnetotransport phenomena that have been interpreted in terms of the so-called chiral anomaly. In this talk, we will shift the focus to a broader class of related materials: semiconductors with an underlying chiral crystalline structure, whose electronic structure generically displays Weyl nodes embedded in the conduction and valence bands. Specifically, we employ the Kubo formula to compute the magnetotransport properties when the chemical potential is moved to the conduction band by doping, focusing on the non-trivial relationship between the current and the magnetic field enabled by the existence of the effective electric toroidal monopole moment intrinsic to the chiral crystal lattice. We also discuss possible applications of these results to elemental tellurium, which realizes a chiral semiconductor.