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Large unsaturated positive and negative magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetal TaP

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Abstract

After successfully growing single-crystal TaP, we measured its longitudinal resistivity (ρ xx ) and Hall resistivity (ρ yx ) at magnetic fields up to 9 T in the temperature range of 2-300 K. At 8 T, the magnetoresistance (MR) reached 3.28 × 105% at 2 K, 176% at 300 K. Neither value appeared saturated. We confirmed that TaP is a hole-electron compensated semimetal with a low carrier concentration and high hole mobility of μ h=3.71 × 105 cm2/V s, and found that a magnetic-field-induced metal-insulator transition occurs at room temperature. Remarkably, because a magnetic field (H) was applied in parallel to the electric field (E), a negative MR due to a chiral anomaly was observed and reached -3000% at 9 T without any sign of saturation, either, which is in contrast to other Weyl semimetals (WSMs). The analysis of the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations superimposed on the MR revealed that a nontrivial Berry’s phase with a strong offset of 0.3958, which is the characteristic feature of charge carriers enclosing a Weyl node. These results indicate that TaP is a promising candidate not only for revealing fundamental physics of the WSM state but also for some novel applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    JianHua Du, Qin Chen, QianHui Mao, Rajwali Khan, BinJie Xu, YuXing Zhou, YanNan Zhang, ChunMu Feng & MingHu Fang

  2. Department of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 310036, China

    HangDong Wang, JinHu Yang & Bin Chen

  3. Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing, 210093, China

    MingHu Fang

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  1. JianHua Du
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Correspondence to MingHu Fang.

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Du, J., Wang, H., Chen, Q. et al. Large unsaturated positive and negative magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetal TaP. Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron. 59, 657406 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-016-5798-4

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