Photo-induced modification and relaxation dynamics of Weyl-semimetals

Abstract

The use of ultrashort laser pulses to investigate the response of materials on femtosecond time-scales enables detailed tracking of charge, spin and lattice degrees of freedom. When pushing the limits of the experimental resolution, connection to theoretical modeling becomes increasingly important in order to infer causality relations. Weyl-semimetals is particular class of materials of recent focus due to the topological protection of the Weyl-nodes, resulting in a number of fundamentally interesting phenomena. In this work, we provide a first-principles framework based on time-dependent density-functional theory for tracking the distribution of Weyl-nodes in the Brillouin-zone following an excitation by a laser pulse. For the material TaAs, we show that residual shifts in the Weyl-Nodes' position and energy distribution is induced by a photo-excitation within femto-seconds, even when the laser-frequency is off-resonant with the Weyl-node. Further, we provide information about the relaxation pathway of the photoexcited bands through lattice vibrations.