Light-induced ideal Weyl semimetal in HgTe via nonlinear phononics

Abstract

Interactions between light and matter allow the realization of out-of-equilibrium states in quantum solids. In particular, nonlinear phononics is one of the efficient approaches to realizing the stationary electronic state in non-equilibrium. Herein, by using extended $ab~initio$ molecular dynamics, we identify that long-lived light-driven quasi-stationary geometry could stabilize the topological nature in the material family of HgTe compounds. We show that coherent excitation of the infrared-active phonon mode results in a distortion of the atomic geometry with a lifetime of several picoseconds. We show that four Weyl points are located exactly at the Fermi level in this non-equilibrium geometry, making it an ideal long-lived metastable Weyl semimetal. We propose that such a metastable topological phase can be identified by photoelectron spectroscopy of the Fermi arc surface states or ultrafast pump-probe transport measurements of the nonlinear Hall effect.