Entanglement spectrum of topological Weyl semimetal

National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and Department of Physics, Nanjing University Nanjing 210093, China

Received: 30 July 2014
Accepted: 5 August 2014

Abstract

The concept of entanglement spectrum, which was previously associated with gapped topological phases, is extended to the gapless Weyl semimetal phase. By dimensional reduction, we numerically investigate entanglement spectra of Weyl semimetal phases in two three-dimensional (3D) lattice models consisting of coupled layers of 2D quantum anomalous Hall insulators. It is found that for the gapless phase, there still exists a correspondence between the entanglement surface state and the physical surface state; and the “trace index”, defined as the discontinuity in the trace of the single-particle entanglement spectrum, remains equivalent to the Chern number of the 2D insulator layers.