Paper detail

Creating Weyl nodes and controlling their energy by magnetization rotation

As they do not rely on the presence of any crystal symmetry, Weyl nodes are robust topological features of an electronic structure that can occur at any momentum and energy. Acting as sinks and sources of Berry curvature, Weyl nodes have been predicted to strongly affect the transverse electronic response, like in the anomalous Hall or Nernst effects. However, to observe large anomalous effects the Weyl nodes need to be close to or at the Fermi-level, which implies the band structure must be tuned by an external parameter, e.g. chemical doping or pressure. Here we show that in a ferromagnetic metal tuning of the Weyl node energy and momentum can be achieved by rotation of the magnetization. Taking Co$_3$Sn$_2$S$_2$ as an example, we use electronic structure calculations based on density-functional theory to show that not only new Weyl fermions can be created by canting the magnetization away from the easy axis, but also that the Weyl nodes can be driven exactly to the Fermi surface. We also show that the dynamics in energy and momentum of the Weyl nodes strongly affect the calculated anomalous Hall and Nernst conductivities.