Abstract
The chiral magnetic effect is the generation of an electric current induced by chirality imbalance in the presence of a magnetic field. It is a macroscopic manifestation of the quantum anomaly1,2 in relativistic field theory of chiral fermions (massless spin 1/2 particles with a definite projection of spin on momentum)—a remarkable phenomenon arising from a collective motion of particles and antiparticles in the Dirac sea. The recent discovery3,4,5,6 of Dirac semimetals with chiral quasiparticles opens a fascinating possibility to study this phenomenon in condensed matter experiments. Here we report on the measurement of magnetotransport in zirconium pentatelluride, ZrTe5, that provides strong evidence for the chiral magnetic effect. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments show that this material’s electronic structure is consistent with a three-dimensional Dirac semimetal. We observe a large negative magnetoresistance when the magnetic field is parallel with the current. The measured quadratic field dependence of the magnetoconductance is a clear indication of the chiral magnetic effect. The observed phenomenon stems from the effective transmutation of a Dirac semimetal into a Weyl semimetal induced by parallel electric and magnetic fields that represent a topologically non-trivial gauge field background. We expect that the chiral magnetic effect may emerge in a wide class of materials that are near the transition between the trivial and topological insulators.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. Misewich, P. Johnson, A. Abanov and G. Monteiro for discussions. This work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, contracts No. DE-AC02-98CH10886, No. DE-FG-88ER40388, Office of Nuclear Physics, contract No. DE-FG-88ER41723 and ARO MURI Program, grant W911NF-12-1-0461. ALS is operated by the US DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
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D.E.K. designed and, with Q.L. and T.V., directed the study, analysed results, and wrote the manuscript. Q.L. and C.Z. performed the transport measurements and analysed results. R.D.Z., J.A.S. and G.D.G. grew the crystals and performed X-ray diffraction experiments, Y.H. performed the SEM/TEM measurements and provided analysis. I.P., A.V.F. and T.V. performed the ARPES measurements and analysed results. All authors made contributions to writing the manuscript.
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Li, Q., Kharzeev, D., Zhang, C. et al. Chiral magnetic effect in ZrTe5. Nature Phys 12, 550–554 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3648
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3648
