Magneto-optical conductivity in the type-I and type-II phases of Weyl/multi-Weyl semimetals

Abstract

Magneto-optical conductivity is a very widely studied transport coefficient, useful to understand and characterize the behaviour of materials under magnetic fields. Using the Kubo formula, we compute the components of the conductivity tensor $\sigma_{\mu \nu}$ transverse to a uniform magnetic field $\mathbf B$, for a single node of a multi-Weyl semimetal (with monopole charge $J$ equal to two or three). We also include the results for a Weyl semimetal (with $J=1$), and identify peaks in the conductivity profile which were not reported in earlier studies. In our analysis, we explore how the tilting of the Weyl/multi-Weyl cone affects $\sigma_{\mu \nu}$, focussing on both type-I and type-II phases. All these systems have a linear-in-momentum dispersion along the tilting axis, which is chosen to align with $\mathbf B$. In the type-II phases, open Fermi pockets appear as artifacts of the low-energy effective continuum models, which ignore higher-order momentum terms of the actual bandstructures. Hence, we supplement the linear power term with a cubic term, which closes the Fermi pockets, thus eliminating any need for an ad hoc cutoff for the momentum integrals. Our results reveal that the absorptive parts of $\sigma_{\mu \nu}$ display multiple peaks as functions of the frequency, whose locations are determined by an energy scale $\sim |\mathbf B|^{J/2} $.