Photocurrents in Weyl semimetals

Abstract

The generation of photocurrent in an ideal two-dimensional Dirac spectrum is symmetry forbidden. In sharp contrast, we show that three-dimensional Weyl semimetals can generically support significant photocurrents due to the combination of inversion symmetry breaking and finite tilts of the Weyl spectra. Symmetry properties, chirality relations, and various dependencies of this photovoltaic effect on the system and the light source are explored in detail. Our results suggest that noncentrosymmetric Weyl materials can be advantageously applied to room temperature detections of mid- and far-infrared radiations.