Sometimes the hunt for new kinds of fundamental particles takes place in the low-energy degrees of freedom of exotic quantum materials
Over the past decade, such strange entities as magnetic monopoles, Majorana fermions, and even Higgs modes have been predicted and identified inside materials at low temperatures. The goal of learning to manipulate these new quanta for technological purposes is a grand challenge for science, predicted to spark a “second quantum revolution”. Among the intriguing zoo of new particles which exploit the topological properties of electronic wavefunctions, the Weyl fermions (which are charged, massless, and chiral) were originally postulated in the 1920s but have never been observed in high-energy physics experiments. However, compelling evidence for Weyl physics inside certain classes of semi-metals has accumulated over the past three years. The material TaAs, for example, has been shown to host special electronic band crossings (“nodes”) where the quasiparticles act like Weyl fermions. Subsequently, a second type of Weyl semimetal (called “type-II”) was theoretically predicted to exist in the material MoTe2. Weyl semi-metals are predicted to host Fermi surface lines with non-trivial topological properties at the material surface. Initial support for the type-II Weyl picture of MoTe2 has been published in the form of ARPES experiments, but the full, bulk electronic structure was until recently unknown.