Electron currents from gradual heating in tilted Dirac cone materials

Abstract

Materials hosting tilted Dirac/Weyl fermions provide an emergent spacetime structure for the solid state physics. They admit a geometric description in terms of an effective spacetime metric. Using this metric that is rooted in the long-distance behavior of the underlying lattice, we formulate the hydrodynamic theory for tilted Dirac/Weyl materials in $2+1$ spacetime dimensions. We find that the mingling of space and time through the off-diagonal components of the metric gives rise to: (i) heat and electric currents proportional to the temporal gradient of temperature, $\partial_t T$ and (ii) a non-zero Hall-like conductance $\sigma^{ij}\propto \zeta^i\zeta^j$ where $\zeta^j$ parameterize the tilt in $j$'th space direction. The finding (i) above that can be demonstrated in the laboratory, implies that the non-trivial emergent spacetime geometry in these materials empowers them with a fascinating capability to harness naturally available sources of $\partial_t T$ of hot deserts to produce electric current. We further find a tilt-induced non-Drude contribution to conductivity which can be experimentally disentangled from the usual Drude pole.