Giant photocurrent in asymmetric Weyl semimetals from the helical magnetic effect

Abstract: We propose a new type of photoresponse induced in asymmetric Weyl semimetals in an external magnetic field. In usual symmetric Weyl semimetals in a magnetic field, the particles and holes produced by an incident light in different Weyl cones have opposite helicities and hence move in opposite directions, canceling each others's contributions to the photocurrent. However this cancelation does not occur if the Weyl semimetal possesses both a broken particle-hole symmetry and a broken spatial inversion symmetry. We call the resulting generation of photocurrent the helical magnetic effect because it is induced by the helicity imbalance in a magnetic field. We find that due to the large density of states in a magnetic field, the helical magnetic effect induces a remarkable large photocurrent for incident THz frequency light. This suggests a potential application of asymmetric Weyl semimetals for creating THz photosensors.