Weyl fermions in cylindrical wires

Abstract

The key feature of Weyl semimetals (WSM) is the presence of topologically protected Dirac cones in a 3D material. We consider the effect of restricting geometry on the spectrum of excitations in WSM using as a model a cylindrical WSM wire. For the full manifold of hard boundary conditions, we derive the general form of the dispersion equation relating the energy of the excitations and their momentum along the wire. We show that only the special class of boundary conditions, corresponding to decoupled helicities or, equivalently, to pinned directions of the electron spin on the surface, support massless excitations. For a general boundary condition, these excitations acquire mass inversely proportional to the radius of the wire. This demonstrates that boundary phenomena may play a crucial role in formation of excitations in WSM based structures.