Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 99
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-70739-x

Regular Article

Magneto-optical conductivity study in three-dimensional Dirac semimetals of ZrTe₅

School of Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, P.R. China

^a e-mail: wangyixiang@jiangnan.edu.cn

Received: 19 December 2016
Received in final form: 9 March 2017
Published online: 24 May 2017

Abstract

The three-dimensional (3D) Dirac semimetal material of ZrTe₅ provides a possible platform for studying 3D Dirac fermions. It can realize both the point-node semimetal phase and line-node semimetal phase when the intrinsic Zeeman interaction acts along different crystalline directions. In this work we present a study of magneto-optical conductivity in ZrTe₅. We calculate the optical conductivities in different phases, which exhibit a series of resonant peaks lying on a growing background whose origins are explored. For the Weyl semimetal phase, two striking signatures are found, one is the existence of an additional n = 0 LL transition and another is the double-strong peak structure related to the LL transition in one dispersion branch. While in the line-node semimetal phase, the weak peak appear and the strong peaks have higher degeneracy. We discuss the implications of these results in experiment.