Extremely high magnetoresistance and conductivity in the type-II Weyl semimetals WP2 and MoP2

• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01758-z
• Publication Date: 2017-11-15T14:59:09Z
• Authors: Nitesh Kumar; Yan Sun; Nan Xu; Kaustuv Manna; Mengyu Yao; Vicky Süss; Inge Leermakers; Olga Young; Tobias Förster; Marcus Schmidt; Horst Borrmann; Binghai Yan; Uli Zeitler; Ming Shi; Claudia Felser; Chandra Shekhar
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Materials Science; Science; Q; Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences; Correlated Electron Systems / High Field Magnet Laboratory (HFML); 02 engineering and technology; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy; Article; 0103 physical sciences; 0210 nano-technology

AbstractThe peculiar band structure of semimetals exhibiting Dirac and Weyl crossings can lead to spectacular electronic properties such as large mobilities accompanied by extremely high magnetoresistance. In particular, two closely neighboring Weyl points of the same chirality are protected from annihilation by structural distortions or defects, thereby significantly reducing the scattering probability between them. Here we present the electronic properties of the transition metal diphosphides, WP2 and MoP2, which are type-II Weyl semimetals with robust Weyl points by transport, angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and first principles calculations. Our single crystals of WP2 display an extremely low residual low-temperature resistivity of 3 nΩ cm accompanied by an enormous and highly anisotropic magnetoresistance above 200 million % at 63 T and 2.5 K. We observe a large suppression of charge carrier backscattering in WP2 from transport measurements. These properties are likely a consequence of the novel Weyl fermions expressed in this compound.