Spontaneous persistent currents and time-reversal symmetry breaking in thick-walled Weyl semimetal cylinders

@misc{perezpedraza2026spontaneous,
  title = {{Spontaneous persistent currents and time-reversal symmetry breaking in thick-walled Weyl semimetal cylinders}},
  author = {J. C. Pérez-Pedraza and Juan A. Cañas and Daniel A. Bonilla and A. Martín-Ruiz},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.27368},
  eprint = {2605.27368},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27368},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Spontaneous persistent currents and time-reversal symmetry breaking in thick-walled Weyl semimetal cylinders
AU  - J. C. Pérez-Pedraza
AU  - Juan A. Cañas
AU  - Daniel A. Bonilla
AU  - A. Martín-Ruiz
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/26
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.27368
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27368
AB  - We theoretically investigate the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a thick-walled Weyl semimetal (WSM) cylinder subject to an external axial magnetic field. By employing a low-energy effective Hamiltonian, we analytically solve the eigenvalue problem for both infinite and finite-length cylindrical geometries. We apply infinite-mass boundary conditions at the radial walls and MIT bag boundary conditions at the cylinder caps to properly account for intra-node confinement and inter-valley scattering, respectively. Our numerical results demonstrate that the spatial separation of the Weyl nodes acts as an internal chiral gauge field. This geometric field intrinsically breaks time-reversal (TR) symmetry, lifting the chiral degeneracy even at zero external flux. This symmetry breaking manifests as spontaneous persistent currents and the unfolding of conductance channels. Furthermore, longitudinal confinement induces propagation-direction-dependent energy splitting, altering the partial density of states and causing spatio-chiral current imbalances.
ER  -