Surface and 3D quantum Hall effects from engineering of exceptional points in nodal-line semimetals

Abstract

We investigate the potential of the surface states of 3D nodal-line semimetals to produce surface and 3D quantized Hall effects in which the electronic currents flow unidirectionally along the surface of the material. This phenomenology is based on the fact that, irrespective of its orientation, a strong magnetic field gives rise to a zero Landau level with huge 2D degeneracy of states in the nodal-line semimetal. When the magnetic field is perpendicular to the plane of the nodal line, we show that the evanescent states within the nodal ring are transmuted into Landau surface states which correspond to exceptional points, i.e. branch points which arise upon extension of the spectrum to complex values of the momentum. These Landau surface states are then topologically protected, as the branch cuts in the complex plane lead to a spectrum with the topology of a torus which cannot be modified by smooth perturbations. When the magnetic field is parallel to the nodal ring, we find instead that the evanescent waves are paired inside the bulk of the semimetal, leading to a 3D quantum Hall effect in which Landau states extended over 2D slices of the 3D bulk form a flat level, but start to get some dispersion as they approach the surface of the material. We show that, for both orientations of the magnetic field, the transverse Hall conductivity is quantized in units of $e^2/h$, with very large values of the Chern number which afford very high conductivities along the surface of the 3D material.