Transport signatures of surface states in a Weyl semimetal: evidence of field driven Fermi arc interferometry

Abstract: A signature property of Weyl semimetals is the existence of topologically protected surface states - arcs in momentum space that connect Weyl points in the bulk. However, the presence of bulks states makes detection of surface contributions to the transport challenging. Here we present a magnetoresistance study of high-quality samples of the prototypical Weyl semimetal, TaAs. By measuring the Shubnikov de Haas effect, we reveal the presence of a two-dimensional cyclotron orbit. This orbit is quantitatively consistent with the interference of coherent quasiparticles traversing two distinct Fermi arcs on the [001] crystallographic surface. The observation of this effect suggests that high magnetic fields can be used to study not only the transport properties of Fermi arcs, but also the interference of their quantum mechanical wavefunctions.