Linear optical conductivity of chiral multifold fermions

Abstract

Chiral multifold fermions are quasiparticles described by higher spin generalizations of the Weyl equation, and are realized as low energy excitations near symmetry protected band crossings in certain chiral crystals. In this work we calculate the linear optical conductivity of all chiral multifold fermions. We show that it is enhanced with respect to that of Weyl fermions with the same Fermi velocity, and features characteristic activation frequencies for each multifold fermion class, providing an experimental fingerprint to detect them. We calculate the conductivity for realistic chiral multifold semimetals by using lattice tight-binding Hamiltonians that match the effective models of multifold fermions at low energies, for space groups 199 and 198. The latter includes RhSi, for which we give quantitative predictions, and also CoSi and AlPt. Our predictions can be tested in absorption or penetration depth measurements, and are necessary to extract the recently proposed quantized photocurrents from experiments.