Controlling the band structure of a Weyl semimetal through nanostructuring.

In recent years exotic relativistic quasiparticles have been found to exist in the band structure ofdifferent materials, like Dirac fermions in graphene, or topological insulating states in topologicalinsulators. Recently it was shown for first time that one of such band configurations to have aneffect on a collective property like the magnetism. In NdAlSi, it was reported that the existence ofWeyl nodes was in the root of a magnetic helical ordering. The objective of this experiment is totest the effect of size reduction in such helical order. This experiment will shed light into the effectof electronic confinement in the relativistic quasiparticles.

近年来，奇异相对论准粒子已被发现存在于不同材料的能带结构中，例如石墨烯中的狄拉克费米子，或拓扑绝缘体中的拓扑绝缘态。近期，研究人员首次证明这类能带构型之一会对磁性等集体性质产生影响。据报道，在NdAlSi中，外尔节点（Weyl nodes）的存在是磁性螺旋有序的根源。本实验的目的是测试尺寸减小对这种螺旋有序的影响。该实验将阐明电子约束（electronic confinement）对相对论准粒子的作用。