Spin-momentum locking in bulk and surface of chiral topological semimetals

The spin texture of electronic bands has been studied for decades in magnetic materials due to its promising applications in the field of spintronics, which aims to exploit the spin degree of freedom. Recently, it has been shown that non-magnetic materials can present exotic spin textures, which makes them promising for microelectronics applications due to the lack of stray fields. In order to present non-trivial spin degeneracies, these systems break crystalline rotoinversion symmetries, and are thus structurally chiral. In this work we revisit the chiral toy model in space group 198 introduced in Ref [1] as a proxy for materials in the B20 family and study the spin textures as a function of spin-orbit coupling strength. We study the spin texture of the surface Fermi arcs, which has also attracted attention recently [2], and show that the spin-momentum locking varies along the surface BZ.

[1] Mao et al., Phys. Rev. B 106, 245101

[2] Krieger et al., arXiv:2210.08221