Competition between the inter-valley scattering and the intra-valley scattering on magnetoconductivity induced by screened Coulomb disorder in Weyl semimetals
Xuan-Ting Ji,¹ Hai-Zhou Lu,^2,a Zhen-Gang Zhu,^1,3,b and Gang Su^3,4,c
1School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
²Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering and Department of Physics, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen 518055 China
³Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and Computational Materials Physics Laboratory, School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
⁴Kavli Institute of Theoretical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
(Received 31 July 2017; accepted 13 September 2017; published online 3 October 2017)

Recent experiments on Weyl semimetals reveal that charged impurities may play an important role. We use a screened Coulomb disorder to model the charged impurities, and study the magneto-transport in a two-node Weyl semimetal. It is found that when the external magnetic field is applied parallel to the electric field, the calculated longitudinal magnetoconductivity shows positive in the magnetic field, which is just the negative longitudinal magnetoresistivity (LMR) observed in experiments. When the two fields are perpendicular to each other, the transverse magnetoconductivities are measured. It is found that the longitudinal (transverse) magnetoconductivity is suppressed (enhanced) sensitively with increasing the screening length. This feature makes it hardly to observe the negative LMR in Weyl semimetals experimentally owing to a small screening length. Our findings gain insight into further understanding on recently actively debated magneto-transport behaviors in Weyl semimetals. Furthermore we studied the relative weight of the inter-valley scattering and the intra-valley scattering. It shows that the former is as important as the latter and even dominates in the case of strong magnetic fields and small screening length.We emphasize that the discussions on inter-valley scattering is out of the realm of one-node model which has been studied.