weyl fermions

The 2015 discovery of a Weyl semimetal—and the Weyl fermions it harbored—provoked a flurry of activity from researchers around the globe. A quick glance at a recent physics journal or the online arXiv preprint server testifies to the topic’s popularity. The arXiv alone has had more than 200 papers on Weyl semimetals posted in 2016.Researchers at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland have been interested in Weyl physics since before last summer’s discovery, publishing 18 papers on the topic over the past two years. In all, more than a dozen scientists at Maryland have been working to understand the fundamental properties of these curious new materials.

For decades, particle accelerators have grabbed headlines while smashing matter together at faster and faster speeds. But in recent years, alongside the progress in high-energy experiments, another realm of physics has been taking its own exciting strides forward.That realm, which researchers call condensed matter physics, studies chunks of matter moving decidedly slower than the protons in the LHC. In fact, the materials under study—typically solids or liquids—are usually sitting still. That doesn't make them boring, though. Their calm appearance can often hide exotic physics that arises from their microscopic activity."In condensed matter physics, the energy scales are much lower," says Pallab Goswami, a postdoctoral researcher at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland. "We want to go to lower energies and find new phenomena, which is exactly the opposite of what is done in particle physics."