Giant topological longitudinal circular photo-galvanic effect in the chiral multifold semimetal CoSi.

The absence of mirror symmetry, or chirality, is behind striking natural phenomena found in systems as diverse as DNA and crystalline solids. A remarkable example occurs when chiral semimetals with topologically protected band degeneracies are illuminated with circularly polarized light. Under the right conditions, the part of the generated photocurrent that switches sign upon reversal of the light's polarization, known as the circular photo-galvanic effect, is predicted to depend only on fundamental constants. The conditions to observe quantization are non-universal, and depend on material parameters and the incident frequency. In this work, we perform terahertz emission spectroscopy with tunable photon energy from 0.2 -1.1 eV in the chiral topological semimetal CoSi. We identify a large longitudinal photocurrent peaked at 0.4 eV reaching  ~550 µ A/V2, which is much larger than the photocurrent in any chiral crystal reported in the literature. Using first-principles calculations we establish that the peak originates only from topological band crossings, reaching 3.3 ± 0.3 in units of the quantization constant. Our calculations indicate that the quantized circular photo-galvanic effect is within reach in CoSi upon doping and increase of the hot-carrier lifetime. The large photo-conductivity suggests that topological semimetals could potentially be used as novel mid-infrared detectors.

Communication: Shock adiabat of atomic nitrogen at megabar pressures.

We use spherical cellular method combined with a self-consistent density functional approach (quasizone method) to calculate the band structure and bulk properties of atomic nitrogen at megabar pressures and densities 3.2÷3.6 g/cm(3). Thermodynamic functions and shock adiabat calculated by this method correspond to recent measurements, showing a sharp increase in pressure along the shock adiabat in this range of densities.

Density-noise power fluctuations in vibrated granular media.

The noise power spectra of the fluctuations in density of a vibrated column of granular material are found to be time dependent. Spectral analysis of these noise power fluctuations shows nontrivial frequency dependences. The noise powers at different frequencies are also found to fluctuate in a partially correlated way. In most instances, the slow variations of the noise are strongly correlated over a broad range of frequencies. These results indicate that highly cooperative interactions exist between fluctuators. In contrast, effects of such strongly coupled fluctuators are absent in the one-dimensional parking-lot-model, one of the simplest systems used to provide a model for recent granular compaction experiments.