We study the surface states of a strongly coupled Weyl semimetal within holography. By explicit numerical computation of an inhomogeneous holographic Weyl semimetal, we observe the appearance of an electric current restricted to the surface in presence of an electric chemical potential. The integrated current is universal in the sense that it only depends on the topology of the phases showing that the bulk-boundary correspondence holds even at strong coupling. The implications of this result are subtle and may shed some light on anomalous transport at weak coupling.
INTRODUCTIONWeyl semimetals (WSMs) are novel gapless topological states of matter with electronic low-energy excitations behaving as left-and right-handed Weyl fermions [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. These quasiparticles are localized around Weyl nodes in the Brillouin zone, points where, in band theory, valence and conduction bands touch at the Fermi energy. The Nielsen-Ninomiya theorem [1] states that left-and right-handed Weyl nodes appear in pairs. The existence of these nodes requires either inversion or time reversal symmetry to be broken. In the latter case, Weyl nodes of opposite chirality are separated spatially in the Brillouin zone. Weyl nodes can be characterized as monopoles of Berry flux with charge ±1 which reflects the chirality of the excitations. As such, Weyl nodes represent topological objects in the Brillouin zone and are stable under most perturbations, including interactions. As in topological insulators, the existence of surface states is guaranteed by topology. Moreover, it has been shown [2] that the surface states of a WSM form so-called Fermi arcs connecting the projections of the Weyl nodes onto the surface Brillouin zone.The transport properties of WSMs are tightly bound to the axial anomaly of quantum field theories with Weyl fermions. This leads to anomaly-related phenomena in WSMs such as the anomalous Hall effect [8][9][10][11][12], the chiral magnetic effect [13,14] and related effects like the negative magnetoresistance [15,16]. Furthermore, it has been predicted that lattice deformations couple to the fermionic low-energy excitations with different signs, giving rise to effective axial gauge fields [17,18]. Such lattice deformations naturally arise at the surfaces of a WSM, inducing localised axial magnetic fields in their vicinity. Moreover, it was shown that the Fermi arcs can be understood from this perspective as zeroth Landau levels generated by these fields [19].It is important to remark that in the strong coupling regime the description in terms of bands, or even correlation functions, cannot be applied and therefore it is compelling to study to which extent the weak coupling intuitions can be extrapolated. In Refs. [20,21], the authors addressed the question whether the properties of a (homogeneous and infinite) WSM can be found in the strong coupling regime. To this end, they presented a holographic model which exhibits a topological phase transition from a trivial phase to a non-trivial WSM phase. In this letter...